This is stemming from the forced busing thread. A lot of the issues involved with poor performing schools and students is lack of parental involvement and support. At some point people should be sterilized for their own good, that of their other children, and society as a whole.
We force people to be licensed and regulated in virtually all aspects of our lives besides having kids. When someone has too many kids, can’t afford them, is a crack whore meth head, or multiple time felon their ability to reproduce should be reduced or eliminated to better things for any existing offspring and/or not bring additional kids into the world.
“Whereas the hereditarily healthy families have for the most part adopted a policy of having only one or two children, countless numbers of inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the community.”
A)I did know but more importantly
B)“Do you know who said that?” Almost always means Hitler.
As for the OP. I am totally 100% in favor of forced sterilization/licensed pregnancies, but I also understand that determining who or why or how that is decided is a fool’s errand not worth my efforts.
I used to live in a city whose “alternative” school was so bad, I was told more than once by more than one person that mandatory sterilization should be a condition of attending that school, and that the school district should have a urologist and a gynecologist on contract for this purpose. :eek: Girls who arrived pregnant who had their babies should have them taken away immediately after birth, whether she wants to do that or not, and placed for adoption. :eek: :eek:
I was horrified when I heard that, and was told, “Work there for a few days and you’ll agree with us.” I also told that story to a woman I know who teaches at a regular high school here, and she told me that the alt-school here has stricter rules than the regular schools, so kids won’t want to go there.
I’ve also heard about OB nurses who, if it was up to them, would require sterilization of any woman who lived in certain neighborhoods in big cities or last names in small towns who came in to give birth, and the baby too, so you get the boys. Again, I guess people can believe anything if they see enough.
This is common knowledge, but, interestingly enough, China implemented a Family Planning Policy including restrictions on having children, fines, and forced contraception and sterilization. So the idea is not science fiction. I want to emphasize this has nothing to do with Hitler or ethnic cleansing, before someone gets mixed up.
The problem with eugenics is who gets to decide who is sterilized?
What are good qualifiers?
There are also dark implications which come with the choices. For example, if we say a mentally ill person is unfit to have children, we are implicitly saying that person (by virtue of being mentally ill) is undesirable; perhaps even unworthy of life. If they were not undesirable, or unworthy of life, why would we have a problem with them having children? The idea is to stop them from having children who are like them, is it not?
If we ban a “crack whore meth head” as the OP describes from having kids, why not also ban an alcoholic? A pot smoker? A person addicted to cigarettes? This also takes away the person’s ability to reform and rehabilitate. A person addicted to crack and meth could get rehab and reform their lives. By sterilizing them for a present circumstance, you are eliminating their possibility for change and forever labeling them by their worst moments. Some of the best parents I know, who put their children above all else and try to give as much love as they possibly can, are ex-addicts.
Eugenics is truly a dark road and slippery slope. It is a place society went once, and should never go again.
How long do you have to be poor before you’re sterilized?
What if you’re doing pretty good in your life during your 20s, and after getting struck with cancer and wiping out your savings, losing your job, and insurance, you’re poor in your early 30s? Do you get your kids automatically taken away then, for something you had no control over?
How many times do you have to be arrested before your kids are taken away, and you’re sterilized? Once, twice, three times? Does it have to be a felony, or do misdemeanors count?
No thank you.
The US tried this one time before, and it ended up being horribly abused. We do not need to go down that road again to know it’s a bad idea.
Nothing. People weren’t penalized for multiple births. (Supposedly, some women did take fertility drugs in a purposeful attempt to conceive twins, with what level of success I don’t know.)
To tweak the OP a bit, what if we stopped talking about forced sterilization to instead talk of – uh, encouraged sterilization? Incentivized sterilization? Whatever?
So we’d put aside the question of “who decides what the criteria are”; each person opting for self-sterilization would decide. And if anyone says that making such a determination “is a fool’s errand not worth my efforts” – why, that’s fine, too; he’s opted out, the way others can even as yet others can opt in.
We’d instead be asking how much money we, as a society, want to pour into making sterilization come out ahead in each individual’s cost-benefit analysis.
I don’t trust society to do “forced sterilizations” in a fair and just way. History shows us why.
But I don’t have a problem with society providing free family planning services for low-income individuals. I also don’t have a problem with society providing incentives. You have two kids and you’re still fertile and you’re at the bottom of the Section 8 voucher list? We will move up the list if you agree to go on Norplant or something like it.
Ideally, we should be treating the children born from low-income parents as an asset rather than a burden. Fertility rates are falling. We have two choices if we want to maintain an age structure that’s conducive for a healthy society. We can let in more immigrants, many of whom will be poor and uneducated. Or we can encourage Americans to have as many babies they want and provide a social safety net so that every baby that is born is properly cared for. For the vast majority of cases, the problem isn’t that poor people aren’t good parents. It’s that it is expensive to be a good parent; even middle-class parents realize this. Imagine a society where childcare is an entitlement and each zip code has a stock of affordable and low-income housing. Imagine a society where healthcare costs aren’t the deciding factor for whether a family can support another child.
I think if we make society more “pro-children”, then we can’t just provide more goods and services. We also have to step up protections and enforcement. Child abuse is truly one of the biggest scourges of society. It creates criminals and dysfunctional individuals and families. It even results in poor health outcomes. Instead of pouring more money into policing and prisons, we need to invest more in child protection agencies and affialiated NGOs. We need programs that help to mitigate the effects of dysfunctional families without severing kids from these families. Rich people send their kids to boarding schools out of convenience; why not set up voluntary boarding schools for kids in families with suboptimal living conditions so that parents can get their acts together without screwing up their kids in the process? Institutions get a bad wrap, but there’s a reason why the military is so transformative for so many people. If you’ve spent your whole life learning maladaptive coping mechanisms, you will need a lot of help breaking free from them.
Agreed. Physically punishing someone for being poor is not only unconstitutional, it’s abhorrent in a civilized society.
I’m not certain I can get on board with this. It strikes me as overly coercive, and it punishes the children for actions taken by their parents (that is, those parents who refuse the Norplant).
Without arguing about whether that is good social policy or not, I doubt it would increase the fertility rate. European countries are much closer to that ideal, and they typically have even lower fertility rates than the US.
I can definitely get on board with that idea. But we’d need to tightly regulate such programs as I can see lots of potential for abuse.
