Ah, gotcha.
Well, like your family has been doing, I think she should be eligible for help from society, but with the same strings attached.
We can’t save everyone. We should give it a good effort (as your family has done) and then we should wash our hands of it. You can’t help people who don’t want to be helped.
If I understand the pro-life perspective correctly, a fetus with Down is already a person fully endowed with human rights. From that perspective, it isn’t a morally viable choice not to bring the child to term, any more than it would be the case to cull the population of all children and adults below a certain IQ.
I’d point out that not all defects are the same. I would rather have any of the others you mentioned besides Down, because people of normal or greater intelligence do learn to compensate effectively in other ways when they are deaf or blind. Remarkably, it seems often to be the case that very bright kids who lose their sight early in life often still recount happy childhoods after the event; both Ray Charles and Blind Boone (early ragtimer) were emphatic about that. It’s nothing short of amazing how these kids continued hanging out with their friends, getting around town on their own, and so on. (Ray Charles was famous for never using white a cane or a guide dog).
But I can’t see how that happens with Down Syndrome. I wouldn’t wish that on myself even if you were to give me another magical sense to compliment the original five. The thought of someone having to live their entire life with it is very sad to me.
That’s pretty much the crux of it for me. None of us are perfect.
I think he is clearly right in that regard. And once the value of a person comes down to a cost/benefit analysis, we’ve lost our humanity. The thing that elevates us as humans is our ability to care about things that don’t benefit us personally.
That’s exactly right. Each one of us is vulnerable. Some, by fluke of personality, are more emotionally vulnerable than others. Some, by fluke of some other circumstance, might be more physically vulnerable. But we all are…it’s part of the human condition, and you are right that our human ability to form relationships depends on it.
I just wrote an incredible brilliant and moving post that the board ate, and I have to be somewhere else in 15 minutes. Gah. The short version is that, as Cosmopolitan’s post also illustrates, people with physical disabilities can lead happy and productive lives. This is true whether the problem is present from birth or comes along later in life. Human beings really are incredibly resilient, and when faced with situations that might initially seem like a “fate worse than death”, most people manage to make changes, learn new skills, and generally deal with things and get on with their lives.
Mental disabilities are different, but I think the biggest and most troubling difference for those of us trying to imagine ourselves in that situation is that “myself, with a different brain” isn’t really “me” in the way that “myself, without legs” or “myself, only blind” would be. If I’d been born with Downs syndrome maybe I’d have been happy enough, but I also wouldn’t have been someone I could recognize as myself. I think it’s that, and not the severity of the mental disability itself, that is most distressing.
But even though from my perspective I’d rather deal with blindness or deafness (or certainly albinism – I don’t know why Acid Lamp considers that “debilitating”) than Downs syndrome, there are probably people with Downs syndrome who feel lucky that they aren’t blind or deaf and wouldn’t change places if they could.
My vote:
There is somewhat of a moral imperitive to opt out of pregnancies known to involve a severely handicapped fetus, and it inherently depends on the severity of the handicap, considering the handicap’s burden both on the soon-to-be child and on society. Even in the typical situation where knowledge is imperfect, this is the case - it’s just more practically difficult to act upon.
In the case of Down syndrome, in which I hear people live happy and productive lives, the handicap may not be severe. “Handicap” doesn’t necessarily imply a horrible problem, and we all have various handicaps in various degrees. I vote that potential parents of a child with any known handicap are ethically bound to try to research and understand the question of whether the handicap is a severe one.
What I think we need to get ahold of is this: What makes a handicap “severe”? My state defines me as having a “severe” handicap, though I disagree. If we’re going to use the word, let’s see if we can’t come up with a definition.
I found one definition on the Internet - a definition from 1979:
Quoth http://www.ericdigests.org/1995-1/severe.htm:
By that definition, I’m not severely disabled. However, HUD sees it differently, as of at least 2008:
Furthermore (same page):
So do we hang onto the HUD definition as the definition? If not, what shall we use?