That particular cite doesn’t say much, though others (including this link) note that many individuals with chromosomal abnormalities demonstrate reduced or absent spermatogenesis due (probably) to failures in the meiotic process of gamete formation.
My sister in law is educably retarted and has one child that has normal intelligence. She also had a second child that because of lack of oxygen during birth is partially paralysed on one side of his body. The second child we suspect has some degree of autism. I don’t think my in-laws ever looked into how they could prevent her from having children and my sister-in-law was determined to have children. I can tell you that it has become a burden the for the family. Instead of taking care of one disabled person we now have 3. We had 4 but the husband recently died. The nomal one is in her twenties and immature and cannot support herself. So the answer is yes they can have normal children but they don’t have the mental capacity to raise children but then I have witnessed many normal intelligence people that shouldn’t have children. I hope this answers your question.
willrest writes:
> The [normal] one is in her twenties and immature and cannot support herself.
In what sense is she normal if she is immature and cannot support herself? Note: I assume you meant “normal” rather than “nomal” since you call her normal earlier in your post. I wanted to make a note of the fact that I fixed the spelling since we have to be careful on this message board about changing anyone’s else’s post in quoting it.
Legal consent can be an issue if a person is severely retarded. I vaguely recall news stories of people kept apart because their mental capacity was too child like. Usually its a case where two people met in a special needs facility.
Sounds pretty normal for a lot of 20-somethings.
I knew someone who grew up next to a family in which the parents were both intellectually disabled. They were high functioning enough that (with some supervision by the grandparents) they were able to hold down jobs and care for their children. All of the children but one were also intellectually disabled. The neurotypical child was taken in and raised by one set of the grandparents. This was decades ago–probably in the 1940’s or so.
I remember a made for TV movie about just such a couple that I saw in my youth. My sister and I mock it to this day.
“No. It’s Mrs. Bugs Bunny”
Here it is: Like Normal People (TV Movie 1979) - IMDb
Starring Shaun Cassidy in 1979?
I remember a friend of mine, a children psychologist, stating how shocked she was by some apparently common practices in the USA (legal or not, I wouldn’t know) wrt love and sex life of mentally retarded people. Apparently, in the US, people in charge of them would tend to actively try to prevent relationships and moreso the birth of children. It might be an artifact of a more conservative society rather than a result of recommended practices, though.
(This discussion in fact stemmed from another thread on the SDMB, where the custodian [not family] of a MR woman explained she was preventing such a relationship with a MR male. Although it was consensual, she perceived it as abuse nevertheless and IIRC didn’t think there could be any situation where it wouldn’t be. According to my friend, or rather according to what she knew about US practices, this attitude would be relatively common there)
My younger sister has brain damage from dehydration an an infant due to some kind of fever.
I can’t remember where you are from, but when you consider we have terrible health care and social services in this “first world” country, I’m not surprised at this.
I find it odd that my first thought when reading this GQ was, “Wow, that’s a great question.”
Imagine my surprise to find that I was the OP and that it wasn’t over a decade old like many other of my threads I find resurrected.
Zombie!
From France, but this isn’t an issue of health care or social services.
I taught school, and it definitely has happened.
Yeah we should ban resurrecting new threads.
This is ONE area that REALLY needs to be addressed. I hate saying this, but the overwhelming majority of MR folks really don’t possess the mentality nessary to be parents. It’s like…can you imagine an 8 or 9 year old being a parent? Parents of MR kids REALLY need to be very proactive about preventing pregnancy
AboutAsWeird, “mentally retarded” has many degrees, ranging in maturity from “fully functioning adult” to “having been declared ‘legally incapable of vote, entering contracts or sexual consent’”. If there is something that needs to be treated on a case-by-case basis is something as delicate as this. Remember that not so long ago, those born deaf were considered retarded; I don’t think they should have been prevented from having kids.
I do think it is a matter of “health care and social services” to a point, clairobscur. Countries with UHC assume, as a society, that their weaker members will cared for by society as a whole - not so the US. Countries with compulsory vaccinations view prevention as an integral part of having a healthy society - not so the US, where someone’s right to be an asshole trumps his neighbors’ right to know their children are protected by herd immunity. There’s a lot more behind and under “health care” than merely hospitals when you’re sick, a lot more behind “social services” than CPS, and the whole difference in societal support structure between Here and There stems from completely different views of what a human being is.
In the 2001 movie Sam I am, Sean Penn played an MR man who tries to raise a normal, even smart, daughter by himself.
In the Netherlands, we had a discussion a while ago if MR people who were to some degree institutionalized, and who were romantically involved, should be put on mandatory birth control. I don’t think we really reached a conclusion.
When I was studying psychology back in the 70’s, we were taught about something called the ‘swing towards the norm’. In other words, people with a low IQ would tend to have children with higher IQs than the parent, and people with high IQs would tend to have children with a lower IQ than the parent. I have seen several instances of this in my lifetime.
The term you’re looking for, MsBatt, is “regression toward the mean”:
The idea is that part of what causes anything is random variation. If something is much higher than average the first time, the second time it can be expected to be closer to average the second time. If something is much lower than average the first time, it can be expected to be closer to average the second time. Part of what causes intelligence is random environmental factors. The children of genius parents will probably be not quite as smart. The children of mentally retarded parents will probably be not quite as dumb.
I never saw this one. Did he succeed in getting her to eat green eggs and ham?
Another example from the realm of fiction is Why Me? The Bob Lamonta Story.