Part 2: what if you found out their diagnosis 1 week after birth
Every time you don’t want to have a kid for whatever reason is ethical to abort.
What’s not ethical is to have a child you don’t really want.
This is a decision made by the pregnant person, informed by her/their doctor. I can also see her/their family having some input in informing the pregnant person’s decision, to the extent that they are not being coerced by their family.
As far as outside agents, such as ourselves, are involved, pregnancy is a medical issue. This is the only responsible way for society to handle these questions. Society is able to provide support for parents, esp those who are caretakers of children with severe disabilities, and we can improve education and access to contraceptives. But it is irresponsible and unethical to become involved in the medical decisions of others under any circumstances.
If we really care about unborn children we should care doubly about born children and the families who take on the responsibility of ensuring those disabled individuals are able to experience love and joy. Trying to collapse ethics and morals into pure individual choice is a scam.
Yes
Part 1: GOD YES!!!
Part 2: And thus my long watch has begun.
These are always technology problems more than moral problems. The issue is our technology is too shit currently to fix the genetic disease. Same with abortion generally. If we had artificial wombs then we could even have late term abortions and birth the child to be adopted and yes there is a shortage of babies to be adopted.
and yes there is a shortage of babies to be adopted.
So adopt literally anyone besides a baby instead. The issue is that adoption is almost singularly focused on babies, while the foster system is falling apart at the seams due to being overfilled and underfunded. In the foster system, any child older than 4 is considered a “late” adoption.
The sad reality is that if a baby doesn’t already have adoptive parents waiting for them when they’re born, they likely won’t ever get adopted. Because adoptive parents are entirely focused on adopting babies. And that really says more about the adoptive parents, because it means they’re adopting for their own sake, instead of the child’s. It’s selfish to sit on an adoption list for years to get a baby, instead of simply adopting a toddler who needs a home. The sheer level of arrogance and narcissism on display is honestly astounding. Adoptive parents see a system bursting with kids who need a home, and then go “nah, make a new one just for us. We want that bun straight out of the oven.” It’s honestly disgusting.
It is, I mean unless we start forcing people to adopt kids they don’t want to adopt or something else I’m not sure that will change anytime soon. As for me in my family it’s more like accidental adoptions aka a more distant family member can’t take care of their kid whose 10 then someone else takes them in. It worked that way with family friend’s kids as well. It’s not like official legal guardianship or adoption, more so an informal familial help.
There’s very much an ethical problem here. Sure, it’s fairly clear-cut with some debilitating genetic issues. But there’s a point at which you’re veering into eugenics, and that’s sooner than people think.
Take children who are deaf due to a genetic defect. I’m sure most parents imagine being deaf a terrible lot in life that they’d like to spare their kids from.
Then listen to actual members of the deaf community. They’re proud of their identity, they have their own language, and they’re terrified of the prospect of being essentially eliminated in just a few generations by well-meaning folks that can’t imagine a happy life as a deaf person.
What if we discover a few years from now that there are genetic markers for being queer? What if we can genetically engineer people to be thinner, more muscular, have a more attractive bone structure, lighter skin? Those are all things that offer an objectively more comfortable life, which I’m sure many parents would want for their kids without much thought given to what the societal implications are.
And what if this technology becomes available to a charismatic cult leader, a narcissistic tech CEO, a fascist regime?
Such technology doesn’t just fix genetic diseases. In a hierarchical global society that measures people’s worth by their body rather than their character, it eliminates human diversity.
Yes designer babies are totally going to be a thing. The ethical discussion we had about this in college boiled down to it being ethical if and only if an individual could choose to undo and redo the changes as they desire.
I’ve run into that argument from the deaf community. It’s a tough one, should a community of people have more of a say over what health outcomes are chosen than the parents of said child?
Ultimately technology should make whatever one wills be (short of causing suffering to other minds). Anything less than this is insufficient or otherwise broken technology. Theoretically if we had sufficient technology one could take any form whatsoever they desire at any moment with any senses they desire and so on. Now it’s a quite far fetched concept short of us gaining the ability to digitize our minds or otherwise inhabit simulated realities. To achieve this in physical reality would be quite difficult.
The issue you’re really getting at is the unequal spread of technology and our current technological limitations. Minds should be maximally free to experience whatever they desire short of causing other minds suffering.
Yes.
Part 1: yes, abort
Pat 2: you’d have to be blind to not see that your child has down syndrome for a week. Not much you can do at this point outside of putting the child in the system to be abused and abandoned or murdering it so this is the point where I become stuck with a mentally challenged child.
As fucked up as it sounds, if it’s early enough that there isn’t any chance of it being considered alive, I’d let the family decide whether or not to do it on their own because not every family is capable of that type of constant care and/or affording the bill to pay someone to help.
As for a week after birth, as fucked up as it sounds, if you truly cannot afford the constant care, then probably putting them up for adoption to a family that can afford the care is better, IMO, than not being able to afford to care for said child and having potentially seeing them die from lack of care you cannot afford.
Sometimes you need to make hard decisions to keep afloat financially.
Killing your unborn baby is still killing. If the child can grow up, live a live, see parents, have friends and laugh, then it is unethical to abort.
Part 1: Yeet
Part 2: Looks like I’m down with the sickness.
I think it’s ethical to abort any baby. It’s parasitic on the host, if you don’t consent to the idea how is it any worse than getting a flu vaccine
If you don’t think you can provide a better life for your kid than state care could I see putting it up for adoption to be ethically mandatory
I think that this decision is taken by the mother, and no one else.
What else does it bring if I keep the one-week-old baby alive but suffering to not only himself but all people around him: parents, grandparents, annoyed neighbours, teachers in special schools, eventually indifferent docters?
If it’s guaranteed Hitler will do what he will do, will you kill infant Hitler when you travel back in time? The example in part 2 is just a milder Hitler.
Doctor wouldn’t know how severe.
Down syndrome is regular DNA but one extra copy that interferes randomly with the building of the body.
Every kid is different.
The doctor told us the fetus might have issues based on growth. We didn’t care.
My son was born with down syndrome. The doctor we had said he may not talk much, may not move much, etc.
He will talk your ear off. He graduated highschool with a modified plan. Got the Phys Ed award in the regular grade 12 program. He reads, writes, excels at video editing and PowerPoint creation, excellent at figuring out technical stuff to a degree. Highly social and works partime.
His birth showed me that acedemics aren’t as important as enjoying life for what it is.
Every human has an innate right to access Healthcare and this involves prenatal care for expectant mother’s. Mother’s should have access to screenings for a variety of chromosomal issues some of which are literally incompatible with life and the baby will not live more than a few days if at all. Mothers should also have access to post-natal care. Children with disabilities deserve to have access to Healthcare and education.
It is the United States, the UK, France, “israel” and their NATO nazi allies that jave worked to systematically deny most human beings on earth from having access to basic levels of healthcare and education.
Additionally these fascist colonial entities have imposed destruction that causes more children to be born with significant disabilities. Look at what happened to children born in Iraq after the US invasion. What is happening to Children born in Gaza today. I am sure there are many such examples in history.
I met a guy who had cancer twice, he was only 27, his father was exposed to agent orange.
Theres also this artist, RA Rugged Man, who talks about this kind of thing frequently with his work: https://youtu.be/YV2Guv8l2FY
Awful.
I just started reading an article about the horrible diseases caused to children by Agent orange but I had to stop because I was going to throw up.
Death to America
