Should people be screened & certified 2 make babies?

Great Debates
1

I believe that perhaps as much as 90% of the world’s ills are due to screwed-up people having kids. Crime. Crime. Crime. Welfare. Welfare. Welfare. Trace back the crime committer’s crime record, and all the other negative crap that’s associated with such people, and almost always you’ll find that he/she had parents that weren’t fit to raise corn, much less people.

And the real horror of the madness is that these tax-sucking, crime-committing monsters are permitted by society to have as many kids as they want! No questions asked!

It’s upside down. The law-abiding, healthy, smart, decent and balanced people are the ones that ought to make the babies, not the mindless screw-ups among us! :mad:

For the good of the public, a person has to get a license to operate a hot dog stand. For the good of the public, a person has to have a license to run a beauty salon. And yet, people with criminal records a mile long are allowed to crank-out as many copies of themselves as they want.

Why is this??

Shouldn’t people be required to check into a “Procreation Privilege Center” at a young age and be thoroughly examined in their mind, body and soul to determine if they’re worthy of the honor of one day being called a “Parent”?

It seems like common sense to me. Make the word “parent” become “Parent,” signifying the highest and most prestigious title that any (certified) human being can achieve, and overnight society will become 1000% better!

And those that don’t make the grade? Simple – have them forcibly restrained (if necessary) and clip what needs to be clipped and send them out the door with a coupon that gets them a free milkshake at the local Dairy Queen, or whatever.

How 'bout it, are you with me on this?! :slight_smile:

Maybe it’ll never happen because we live in such a PC society, and not one that runs on honest-to-God cut-the-crap-out common sense. But, then again, maybe if a few greedy lawyers out there start taking a few of these misfit baby-makers to court, suing them for every dime they’ve got, maybe that’ll help straighten the mess out. One way or another, something has to be done or, in time, we’ll go under as a society.

P.S. I’ll be the first one to volunteer to get fixed, right after this new law goes into effect. No problem! :cool:

2

You’re kidding, right?

3

Exactly what standards are it that you propose people have to meet in order to be allowed to avoid forcible sterilization? What tests are to be performed to determine if the criteria are met?

4

Because the government does such an excellent job at this sort of thing.

To be honest, what we need is the government making fewer decisions for people. Not more.

5

I was about to say that’s the worst idea I ever heard, until the part about how it’s going to make greedy lawyers more money. I’m in like Flynn now.

6

Do you really think you are the first brilliant mind to dream this up?

Lots of supposedly smart people have fallen for this toxic philosophy. It’s called eugenics. You might want to read up on it.

7

Better yet, we could advance things by one generation, and just kill everyone who’s “screwed up”- law-breaking, unhealthy, not smart (!), indecent, or unbalanced. And poor, since welfare is a problem. It would accomplish the same goal of making those people not exist, but it would do it sooner. Wanna volunteer now?

8

This sentence has some real merit, absent the certification part. When a role is deemed worthy of respect, people tend to be more careful about how they fill it.

I think it would make a lot of sense for the media to focus attention on outstanding parents, on the strategies they use and the fun they have with their children. Instead we hear a lot about the miserable wretched failures. Which doesn’t exactly inspire.

9

I don’t know how anybody can put two seconds of thought into proposals like these and still think they’re a good idea. GuyNblueJeans’s idea has the benefit of some very overt prejudice against poor people.

Guess what - having kids is a human right. No government has the right to regulate that, and there will never be a government competent to administer testing for it.

For one thing, people change as they get older, so it would be pointless. For another, evaluating a single individual is pointless because people usually don’t have children alone.

Having children is one of those great equalizers. You don’t have to be smart, intelligent, attractive or wealthy to be a parent (or a good parent). Pretty much anybody can do it. [Hence parenthood will never be the greatest honor a person can achieve.] There are obvious downsides to that, but the alternatives are worse.

10

Sounds like a great idea, as long as I get to be the head honcho. Otherwise, not so much.

What if – or when – the graphs of the amount of falling resources left on the planet and the rising number of humans intersect?

11

Your whole premise is faulty. Some the the “best” families produce rotten kids, and vice versa. There is no guarantee what your child will do or become. It is nonsense what you propose. Best to teach morals and values in school as they did years ago. Then give special help to those who need it.

Remember the sperm banks that were supposed to produce thousands of genius children, well it didn’t work. Not even identical twins are identical in manner and morals. There is a great deal more to it than science will ever understand, but we won’t go into it.

12

How, precisely, would you draw this graph? How do you figure in the discovery or development of new resources, or the changing value of existing resources?

Human beings are the best resource we have. What we need to do is expend more effort into making sure their potential is realized.

13

The human race has spent the last few tens of millennia becoming one of the more successful species on the planet. All I have to do is look at any Nature episode featuring a gazelle and I am reminded that we have raised ourselves so far beyond the lifestyle of most of our fellow creatures there’s no comparison.

All this was done without the help of unimposable rules about reproduction. Why fix it if it ain’t broke?

14

Well, it was a bit of a loaded question since we’ll never have to seriously deal with this problem due to our military, but countries in Asia and Africa might. It’s also unnecessary to consider since nature has a funny way of sorting these things out via mass death. So I guess if these places wish to breed like bunnies until their source of fresh water runs dry well, that’s their problem, and we can watch it on CNN while we chew on our popcorn.

15

Will this screening also check for skin pigment?

16

Literacy would be a nice place to start. :dubious:

Seriously, this is pretty much covered in another thread.

17

We should forcibly sterilize the illiterate? I’m as pro-literacy as the next guy, but it’s generally in the form of “We should work hard to teach people to read and write” rather than “We should punish people who fail to learn to read and write”. I suppose you feel that procreation is a privilege, not a right, or some such, but this all feels very icky to me.
(You know, I suppose I may have been whooshed here…)

18

Yes indeed, my first thought was a Simpsons quote… “No one in history has ever had an idea THIS clever!”

19

We could make the first rule “If you have ever used a number in place of a word (that wasn’t the name of the number), you may not breed”.

20

Yes. I think the first criteria should be if you use 133t-speak 2 make ur .