Hearing how you talk about these people, I’m very glad it’s not up to you.
I don’t think there should be a one size fits all approach to this problem. Intellectual handicaps vary wildly. A couple with mild learning disabilities would be perfectly capable of raising a child, a severely retarded couple might not. Even a borderline couple who might be incapable of raising a child on their own might be getting assistance from a family member. It’s best to make these judgements on a case by case basis. As Quartz notes, we have child services, which can remove children from unfit parents. I suppose it would be best if unfit parents didn’t have children in the first place, but the idea of a government that would mandate sterilizing the unfit gives me screaming nightmares.
I know a number of people who are intellectually / mentally disabled (thanks for the distinction, kambukta) who have had their children removed from their care.
These are people who have had many horrible and tragic things happen to them over their lifetimes. They consider that having their children taken away was one of the very, very worst. Even for those who really could not effectively care for their children, the manner in which it was handled was appallingly insensitive and destructive.
Now, I know that this does not mean that nobody should ever have their children taken away, or that no intellectually or mentally disabled person shouldn’t, or even that these particular people shouldn’t.
To me, it just underlines the fact that social institutions have, to an extraordinary degree, victimized and abused these people six ways from Sunday and I don’t for a minute believe that such institutions should be empowered to determine the reproductive future of society’s most marginalized people.
Who decides who is “competent” to raise children, and how do they decide it? Once “they” have decided, do they sterilize everyone who meets that criteria, or do they remove children from their care in case they appear?
I guess my feelings on this are analagous to my feelings on the death penalty. In a perfect world, with perfect institutions and perfect administration, it may or may not be a good idea. My suspicion is that it would be impossible to administer either policy ethically, even under ideal conditions. However, we are far from ideal conditions - the institutions we have are so deeply imperfect that any attempt to administer such a policy would be incompetent at best, and abusive and tragic at worst.
damn, bitter much? why was life so hard for you?
And to clarify my question, I am speaking more along the lines of mentally retarded individuals. Not so much people with mental illness, but people with mental deformities and retardation.
What’s a mental deformation? Not all people with unusual brain structures are MR. I have mylienation (white matter) issues, yet i only have learning disabilties.
I don’t think that there should be mass practice of people with disabilites being prevented from procreating. Yes, there are disabled folks who would make horrible parents, but on the other hand, there are a lot of non disabled folks who would make horrible parents as well. Like many of my mom’s clients(materal child health social worker) are nondisabled…but they make choices and are such horrible parents that you think that maybe, just maybe there might be something to people who advocate sterilization.
i think sterilization on a case to case basis would be ok…like those moms who are on welfare and have kids by ten different dads. there should be a seperate court, for deciding cases like those…i mean some of those people…seriously…like they don’t have a place to live, but they’ll spend money on a purebred dog…and no that’s not an extreme case!
There is the background issue here of Informed Consent.
If you are mentally retarded, and you are deemed by the courts and society to be imparied in development and function, you cannot legally give informed consent. In that case ( and god knows some good SDMB attorney will skip in here with case law to help me here, but I don’t even know where to SEARCH for it ), having sex is being raped. I know that is a real trigger word, but it is. You cannot give consent to be sexually active if you do not possess a mental capacity to do so. End of story.
I worked at a summer camp for mentally retarded adults. We did sometimes find one very active couple, having sex or trying to have sex. The guy was very hot for the gal, and she alternated between seeming extremely scared by all of it, and being pretty into it. They were both what was categorized at that facility as Moderately retarded. ( Mild, Moderately, Severely, Profoundly were the rough groupings).
It was truly rough to handle them, and I was glad that the session only lasted 7 days or so.
My two cents is that it is not fair to call this Eugenics. You are in fact protecting the body and future of a woman who may or may not truly be capable of understanding the sexual act and it’s implications, no less the stressors and dynamics of birthing and raising a baby.
It takes a working uterus to get pregnant. It takes a mature enough mind, and a conscience to raise a child.
Cartooniverse
It wasn’t that long ago that we sterilized the mentally retarded population in some states. Then we went to war with Hitler and the entire concept of eugenics left a really really bad taste in our collective mouths. I don’t know how big a problem it is but it seems to me that if the result of pregnancy among mentally retarded women usually leads to abortion (and I’m not at all sure that it does) then sterilization might not be a bad idea. If mentally retarded women are having lots and lots of children, then we must consider the burden to the state, if any. If it turns out that abortions are not prevalent and that the children of mentally retarded women do not tend to be greater burdens to the state than other children then we have nothing to talk about.
I’ve seen plenty of “normal”, i.e., non-retarded people, completely ruin their lives, their kid’s lives, and their families’ lives, not to mention become a burden to the state. If you can make a case for barring retards from having kids (I’m not saying you can or can’t, just if), I think you can make a case for quite a few other classes of people. And as I always asked myself when I was doing a research paper on eugenics for English 101, “Who decides?” I don’t trust the government to make decisions of that magnitude, ever. I figure I’ve seen quite a few people ruin their own lives and those of their children. It is sad, but why should retarded people exempt from that path? And if it all works out in the end I’m happy for them.
It’s not a question of eugenics, because at least in the cases of ABI (acquired brain injury) there is not any greater chance of their children being born with an intellectual disability than the population average anyway. Depending upon other congenital reasons for the impairment, it might or might not affect kids as well.
However, the socialisation of such children is ‘retarded’ from the outset. You might say the same for children of drug-addicted parents, or ‘trailer trash’ or whatever you want to ‘class’ them as, but the fact is that the latter category of parents might get their shit together sometime. The same is not true for parents with an intellectual disability: they are not capable of becoming better or smarter people/parents than they already are.
And as I said in earlier posts, it makes life really difficult for the children and extended family members if they are called upon to help with the day-to-day caring of the kids. It means that the bio-parents are that in name only, and lack a real understanding of the role they have taken on in bringing up little people.