After this shocking case, should the UK go the whole way and make it mandatory that couples deemed too “stupid” by the State be sterilised?
Why not?
No, one thousand times NO.
Any time this has been tried in the past, the results were absolutely horrendous. Who determines who qualifies for sterilization?
I don’t understand. A judge can make a call on which families are broken apart, with no evidence of maltreatment, on the basis of the parents being too stupid, yet he is unable to make a correct call on sterilisation based upon the same criteria?
What’s the difference? Surely it’s better for all concerned, the “stupid people”, the taxpayer and the children, that the state removes any chance of them conceiving a child?
note I don’t agree with this position and think that this case and cases like it is an appalling overstepping of the mark by social services and the judicial system note
“Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” This is a quote from the U.S. Supreme Court majority opinion in the case of Buck v. Bell in 1927. The court upheld a Virginia law allowing sterilization of the “mentally deficient.” I have two knee-jerk responses to the idea of the state sterilizing such people. The first is that this is too drastic a power to grant to the fallible state. I have abandoned my support of the death penalty partly for this reason. The second is that this is a case where a slippery slope argument may not be a logical fallacy. The eugenics movement in the U.S., whatever its original motivations, found itself taken to one possible logical conclusion in Nazi Germany.
So they can retroactively take Blair’s children away?
That statement is factually incorrect. The judge is not making a call on the basis of intelligence, but on the basis of the actual outcome of the care given by the parents to the children. The Children Act which covers such cases is quite clear that the interests of the Child must come first. If the child is at risk of physical, mental, or sexual mistreatment, or of neglect, then the child may be taken into care. I suspect that the ‘neglect’ test may have been used in this case. Neglect can cover failure to provide a physical, psychological and social environment suitable for normal child development.
It doesn’t make a difference to my point, however. The reason why the parents are unable to create a suitable environment for the upbringing of children is solely because they have learning difficulties. Should they be sterilised?
So, we should sterilize all people who may in the future be unfit parents. Or is it just the people labelled as having learning difficulties who should go under the knife.
Perhaps we should have court hearings for all fertile females and their potential partners to decide on whether they should have a permit to reproduce. If they fail to get this permit they should then be sterilized.
Seems fair to me. 
My humble take on this- people who see sterilization as an answer to this have a deep and abiding unconscious fear of people who are ‘different’ and therefore feel able to treat the people as less than human. Their thinking is basically- they are like animals, let’s spay them.
From what I could see in the articles, the children weren’t neglected or abused. They were well fed and well cared for. The parents simply didn’t meet some sort of unspecified “lower limit” as to mental functioning. I didn’t see anything in the articles about a specific reason the children were taken, and that is scary.
From what I posted above you will see that under English Law, neglect covers cases where the social, psychological and physical circumstances mean that thw child fails to develop and thrive. It is not possible to remove children solely because of the behaviour of the parents, only on the effect that the behaviour has on the children. Courts and social workers are not allowed to take into account any ‘lower limit’ of mental functioning, only the effect that that has on the child.
I would be, I think, okay with the sterilization of persons who permanently cannot legally consent to sexual activities. This isn’t to prevent such persons from spreading their genes or anything like that, it’s to protect them from consequences for things they cannot consent to.
But, I would expect the impetus for such sterilizations to be coming from the guardians of such persons, not the state.
I would heartily second that. I knew someone that wanted sterilization for her daughter, who was physically, mentally and emotionally disabled, because she knew that her daughter was having sex.
However, she’d had to give up custody to the state for financial reasons (daughter lived in a group home), and the state was absolutely unable to legally perform a sterilization.
My friend didn’t object to the consensual sex with another member of the group home - it made her daughter happy - but she was trying to prevent even a remote possibility of pregnancy for someone who was completely unable to handle it in any fashion.
I understand (and generally agree with) the phobia about state-mandated sterilization of “defectives” given the history, but I do think it’s gone a bit overboard when the parents/family can’t request such.
There was also a woman who wanted to have her severely mentally/emotionally disabled son sterilized (neutered, actually, to control his sexual impulses more than his fertility). She felt it was pretty likely that his hormones, his capacity for sexual aggression and his lack of self-control would lead him to do something highly regrettable, and wanted him to get the snip so he wouldn’t hurt the women around him.
Of course, this also has nothing to do with parenting.
Huh? 
Of course, if the law ever becomes even the tiniest bit stricter in its definition of who’s considered disabled enough to be sterilized, everyone who was just barely on the disabled side of the line (and is now just barely on the able side) will still be unable to reproduce.
we need a licensing system, made up of four classes:
A) allowed to reproduce; AND allowed to raise children
B) allowed to reproduce; NOT allowed to raise children
C) NOT allowed to reproduce; BUT allowed to raise children
D) NOT allowed to reproduce; NOT allowed to raise children
people falling under classes C & D are provided sterilization at no cost
licenses are issued at the age of majority
anyone caught having sex without a license or outside of their existing license’s parameters are immediately demoted to C/D level and sterilized
I hope you don’t mean anyone caught having sex before the age of majority should be sterilized. :eek:
damn straight.
What I meant was, this is not a case of people being sterilized because of their percieved inability to parent.
Yes. Laws are arbitrary and can shift. What’s your point?