Should the parents of an intellectually disabled person be allowed to order their sterilisation?
Watching a documentary (Four Corners on the ABC…Australian Broadcasting Corp) the other night got me thinking. While before I was of the opinion that everybody (regardless of disability) should have certain ‘rights’, including reproductive ones, I’m not so sure now. The program showed the difficulties in caring for (particularly young women) who were severely traumatised by the onset of menstruation and the fertility that goes with it.
Given that parents are nowadays to be responsible for their disabled offspring until they can no longer care for them, does that give the parent/s the right to sterilise their children…if for no other reason than to save themselves the burdens of managing their daughter’s menstrual cycles and possible pregnancies?
It does present a gray area, doesn’t it? On the one hand it would be hard not to think of it as a kindness if the young woman were extremely disadvantaged, and would be unable to ever cope with the consequences of fertility, including pregnancy. On the other, there were certainly cases in the past of people being sterilized on the theory that they were defective, only to find later that they were (a) not really that badly off, merely misdiagnosed, or (b) the victim of an incompetent or uncaring caretaker. And then there are all the shades of gray in between. Who gets to decide? What if the person herself says she wants to have a baby, or doesn’t want an operation? The disability could well not be genetic. As you implied, the spectre of forced sterilization raises some ugly pictures.
A question: You said “Given that parents are nowadays to be responsible for their disabled offspring until they can no longer care for them…” Is this a new thing? Was there another practice in the past, and if so, what was it?
I don’t thimk you’ll get a clear cut nay or yea on this, I think it should be decided on a case by case basis.
Come to think of it, I know plenty of “normal” people that should never have been allowed to have kids.
But how can you defend a position like that? And if it ever became a law (let’s say people have to prove they’re worthy parents before they’re allowed to have one…What? don’t look at me like that, if you want to adopt you need to prove you’re a good parent, why not do so for your own?), it would be near impossible to enforce.
Of course, reliable, long term birth control is available - simply make it so that the caretakers can place there disabled charges on Depro Provera or Norplant, and if it turns out the intellectually disabled woman was misdiagnosed/bad caretaker, she could easily get off of the birth control.
Very difficult question. My brother is retarded (age 28) and my parents have been authorized to make every legal decision on his behalf. He should never father any children. He would have no concept of the consequences.
I would say that my parents should have the ability to decide if he should be given a vasectomy, but I don’t think that they would ever do that.
Certainly things have changed here over the past few decades. Where once it was the norm to have disabled children institutionalised, often with little or no contact with their families afterwards (and the state taking on a guardianship role), it is now expected that the family itself will be the primary site of care. The issue facing many families now is “Who is going to look after Jimmy when we get too old/die?”
Sterilization of a woman will not end menstruation unless it is more than the standard tubal ligation.
It would have to include a hysterectomy or the removal of the ovaries. Removing the ovaries has a host of consequences, and a hysterectomy is not minor surgery (IANAD, I don’t believe it would be classified as “minor surgery”).
Oregon recently went through dealing with the issue as well (the state stopped performing the forced sterilizations decades ago, but it was only this year that the governor issued an official apology, etc.).
But forced sterilization by the state is not exactly the same as the parent/s determining what is best for their own child/family. I think of the fact that children in the US have no rights until they are legal adults; until then, their parents and/or the state have complete authority over them, in the legal sense (if there are any lawyers here - who are brave enough to admit it - please correct me if I’m wrong about this).
If a person has a mental disability that will never allow them to reach the capacity to take care of themself or make informed choices, then the parent and/or state presumably would retain that complete authority, would they not? Parents’ rights and authority supercede those of the state (or at least they should) unless the parents are proven to be unfit. So if a fit parent says their son/daughter should have no reason to ever reproduce in the future because it is inarguable that the son/daughter will never have the capacity to be a parent, that sounds reasonable to me.
I could see where this argument would never fly in a state (in the broad sense) where there was a strong Roman Catholic influence, but what are the other possible (reasonable) objections?
Not all mentally disabled people are female, you should know that.
kambuckta, given the track record of the “eugenics” crowd in the last century, I feel that erring on the side of caution is the wise choice for now. When proven implantable female and male contraceptives are available, it might be wise for disabled minors to be protected via parental fiat. Irreversible sterilization is just too far of a reach right now for so many valid reasons.
Parents do decide for a minor child or the mentally deficient about other types of surgery, whether for life-threatening situations or simply to relieve a problem. Presumably a sterilization operation would also be done for the person’s “own good.”
One thing that gives pause is the fear that, if involuntary sterilization could be performed on members of one group “for their own good,” without their consent, where does that end? Should people shown to be carrying genes for degenerative disorders be sterilized “for their own good?” How about people who just seem to be congenitally criminal? Who gets to decide where the boundary is? Parents could be coerced or misinformed.
There is also the spectre of misdiagnosis or overdiagnosis. There have been some cases of people institutionalized, presumably because of mental deficiency, and then much later someone found out they were not really all that deficient. Or they were deaf or suffered from some other mental or physical disability that led to a misdiagnosis.
It is a difficult conundrum. The OP also mentioned young women who were unable to deal with the fact of menstruation. Birth control would not help that.
One thing to keep in mind is that intellectually disabled have completely healthy sex drives. And they’re easy targets. These are reasons why parents or people with guardianship might seek sterilization.
If I had a daughter who was too retarded to live without full-time care (i.e., without the skills for limited independence or a group home) I’d have nightmares about her winding up in a state home and being raped by orderlies after I was dead. (Or Kurt Cobain, or a http://www.tv.cbc.ca/national/trans/T020311.htmlfootball team …) Another woman might feel, just as strongly, that her child should have as much as possible of a “normal” life including, perhaps, her own child. I’m pretty sure that with children who are not in the custody of their bio moms, a group of social workers and a judge get together and “help” the teenagers “consent” to surgery.
I’m going strictly on memory here, but a few years ago, I remember a case, local, I think, of a girl who was terrified of blood. She was also mentally handicapped and fast approaching puberty. I believe the parents were allowed to have a hysterectomy performed on her, but it went to court first. Again, that’s just from memory.
I just don’t know what I’d do in a case like that. From what I recall, the girl went into screaming fits over a small cut. A monthly period would have been a nightmare for everyone. I don’t think anything was available at the time to simply stop the periods, except surgery.
I also have a very good friend who has a capacity around the 10-12 year old range. She’s been legally married twice, aproaching fifteen years with the second husband who has normal intelligence. She can keep house, read and write on a basic level, and carry on a reasonable conversation. She also has two children from the first marriage, both of whom were raised by foster parents.
Do I honestly think she could have raised those girls? Not with their father, for sure, and I rather doubt she could have handled it even with the current husband, since he works fairly long hours. She simply doesn’t understand what a small child is or isn’t capable of. Do I think she ought never to have had them? Well, no. From what I understand they have good families and although slightly handicapped themselves, they’ve gone through school and should have decent lives. If my friend had had a normal family herself, with a mother to give her help and guidence, she might have had a shot at raising them.
“Should the parents of an intellectually disabled person be allowed to order their sterilisation?”
Um, in the 30s & 40s the children were retards and Jews and the parents were Nazis. As I recall, the Nazis quickly fell into disfavor with pretty much the rest of the world, although to be fair, they were up to no good.
But this is The Devil’s question, isn’t it? Because where do you stop when you have allowed yourself to take administrative control over the activities of another? If we can agree that some people should not reporduce, why should we suffer them to live among us? Why not kill 'em and eat 'em?
After all, as biological creatures, our primary function is to reproduce isn’t it? Should we not keep the gene pool clean? Should we not reduce the stress on our much needed resources by cutting out the dead wood? No other species tolerates imperfection the way humans do. So what makes us different? Are we different, or do we just like to think we are?
So maybe the real question is, “What do we want it to mean to be Human.” If we as a species can agree on this, other questions surrounding war, abortion, capital punishment, eugenics, genetic screening, etc. can be more easily answered.
Back in the 1970’s when I was working as a psychiatric nurse, the hospital I worked at had several wards with intellectually disabled patients of varying degrees. There were considered to be no ethical or legal problems with maintaining female patients on depo provera. I don’t recall that serious thought was ever given to sterilization.