There is a 22 year old mentally handicapped girl that was living in a group home. Well it turns out she got pregnant and just delivered a healthy baby girl the other day. The baby went into Child Protective Custody right away and DNA was taken from the child to find out the paternity of the father. It was determined that the 22 year old was raped because she is incapabable of making any decisions about sex. There is no way she was able to give consent.
They took the DNA from the baby girl and found out that the man running the home for the mentally handicapped was the one who raped her. He is 75 years old and is now charged with rape. His wife is being charged with being negligent. The home has been closed.
What kind of legacy will this child have now? Possibly in and out of foster homes until it can be adopted.(If ever adopted) Never knowing her biological parents. The stigma of knowing your father raped your mother.
If the mother of the child had been court ordered to be sterilized this woulnd’t have happened. She may still have been raped but no child would have been a product of the crime.
Those who are mentally challenged, should NOT reproduce.
I know this is not a popular position, and I know the ACLU would jump all over me, but my concern is now and has always been for the children, the “anawim” (God’s little ones) of this world.
If certain people are prevented from conceiving children, many of our lost and desperate ones will become extinct. Heck, adoption as we know it may become extinct!
What could be wrong with that?
I know I know.
What about rights?
What about discrimination?
Who decides who is incompetent?
What about mistakes?
And all that.
I didn’t say it is a perfect solution.
But it can prevent such tragedies
This 22 year old has no memory/capability of knowing about the rape. But this child will have a lifetime of feelings to deal with. It is a crime for both but I really feel for the child.
The Supreme Court has upheld sterilizing the mentally challenged as constitutional, back in the 1927 case BUCK v. BELL, where Justice Holmes quipped his famous line “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”
The list of people who I think shouldn’t reproduce is VERY long. But I’m of the opinion that courts simply don’t have that kind of authority. Without trying to get into a Godwin thing, I do think it’s scary when a government tries to decide how its population should be made up, or who should/shouldn’t reproduce.
Isabelle, it’s not a popular position, but I can see the logic in it. We all know that mentally challenged people have sexual needs, and that mentally challenged people are often in positions where they are vulnerable to abuse or manipulation by others.
I know three mentally challenged women who have had children. Two have had them taken away permanently, the other is only allowed to have them because she lives with her parents and they do the parenting. Not an ideal situation.
It’s a tricky thing, though, because we have to weigh the rights of the individual against what is only a possibility (that the individual can become pregnant or can impregnate.) It sounds less fair when you put it that way. However, when it becomes a reality, you do think “this shouldn’t have happened.”
What kind of legacy will this child have now? Possibly in and out of foster homes until it can be adopted.(If ever adopted) Never knowing her biological parents. The stigma of knowing your father raped your mother.
Last I checked the number of infants needing to be adopted was far less than the number of parents wanting to adopt a baby.
Who in their right mind would sit this child down and say “your dad was a rapist, you know?” There are some things that people don’t need to know about their conception. I would hope that the people around this baby would have the sense to keep it from him/her.
Yes, it might prevent this particular tragedy - actually, no it wouldn’t it would have prevented the child aspect of it, not the rape part - but that doesn’t make it worthwhile. And the questions you ask (“What about rights? What about discrimination? Who decides who is incompetent? What about mistakes? And all that.”) are very serious ones that need to be dealt with if you think this is really the way to solve the problem. Glossing over them and saying “okay, it’s not perfect” doesn’t do that.
What’s happened is we have screwed up the natural selection process and allowed people who would not have survived to procreate and perpetuate the downward spirial of idiocy. We have instituted laws to force idiots to use a seat belt, wear a helmet and take all sorts of precautions which has allowed them to survive and eventually reproduce.
We even PAY people to produce idiots and malcontents (ie. welfare, SSI) while responsible and thoughtful people limit their reproduction because they do not wish to have children they can neither afford nor raise properly. If we had not done all of this then there would be a lot less idiots running around and making more idiots.
If natural selection was going to eliminate things like retardation, it would’ve happened long ago. Your assumption is completely wrong in that respect. As for ‘downward spiral of idiocy,’ well, I don’t think I even need to respond.
That’d work if people had stopped dying in car accidents. For that matter, people can die in car accidents AFTER they’re reproduced, so that doesn’t really make sense. Nor does linking retardation or other genetic condidtions with not wearing seatbelts. And furthermore, those are all relatively new things. Like I said, there were plenty of people with disabilities and illnesses BEFORE seatbelts and seatbelt laws.
The stereotyping here is absolutely GROSS. I will say, though, that your expertise on the welfare system matches your expertise in genetics.
I certainly hope that you are not calling me an idiot or a malcontent due to the economic circumstances surrounding my my family around the time of my birth.
What will be the criteria for classifying certain political beliefs as being signs of “mental deficiency”? After all, this will happen. It is not the place of the state to meddle in such affairs. That is the way of Communists and of Fascists.
Perhaps not sterilization, but instead some other form of long term contraception?
That’s already available without the (if you ask me) extremely yucky issue of a court mandate.
Marley23 can you please explain what you mean by this? How is contraception available? How can a mentally incompetant person use birth control effectively?
I believe there’s at least form of slow-release capsule that can be implanted in the arm (Deprovera?). I’m not quite clear how that avoids the issue of court-mandates, someone has to make the decision to implant it, and I don’t know if carers and\or family have the authority.
And I think I’m with robertliguori, although the obvoius problem with sterilisation is that it’s a lot harder to reverse, for whatever reason.
So are you actually saying I should never have been born because of my disability? Or that I should have been put down the minute my problems became apparent (at nine months)?
