I actually like bacon-wrapped scallops. I also like bacon wrapped pineapple chunks, which is what you serve when you are on a budget.
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Are you saying that because of the chance of making new kids with disabilities or just because the parents might not be able to take care of any kids even if they are normal? Not all mental retardation is genetic. It can be caused by things like complications during childbirth that cut off the oxygen supply but won’t be passed down to their children. Little Forrest Gump turned out just fine for example. I am trying to figure out if you are more focused on the eugenics side or the practical and financial side of depending on others or the state to help with the children.
No, no - AA is fine for those who want to do it, but no one should be forced to go to AA.
MADD is a bullshit cult.
I’m kind of with you on this one. 99.9999999999% of humans, through all of human history, were raised by dirt-poor people who started having large families in their teens- and somehow society went on and was able to produce art and hope and love. Your average American teenage single mother is able to give her child a life of comfort, education and safety that most people on the planet couldn’t even begin to dream of. Somehow, the standard of “that person is too poor to raise kids” is always at a point just a few steps away from where the person saying it is. Can’t you see how arrogant and absurd this sounds, when an American kid now can expect things that almost nobody in human history could even dream of? Statististically, if the average American single teen mother is too poor to have kids, than basically only .00000000000001% of humans who have ever existed should have had kids.
Honestly I think being a single mother and a teen mother is only difficult because our society is set up to make it difficult. I can understand how people don’t want to pay for welfare, but really most people who are on welfare are only on it for a few years, and they’ll end up more than paying it back. It seems silly to begrudge someone that.
Hell, I think I might have been better off as a teen mom. My mom had me young, and it was rough when we were growing up. But by the time I was out of the house she was still young enough to make up for the partying and adventure that she missed in her 20s- and unlike a 25 year old, she has the money and maturity to really take it all in. Meanwhile I’m 30, and while it was fun to have no responsibilities in my 20s, having kids in the house until I’m 50 doesn’t sound like much fun to me. Sometimes I wish I had popped one out while I still had close family nearby to help me raise it, and if I’d had a kid at 15 I’d be practically done with child raising by now and free to focus on my career and having fun without risking ruining my chances of a family.
You are correct in lots of ways. I am 38 and my best friend (same age) has been a grandfather for two years. It is still done that way in certain parts of the country. The family has redneck/white trash roots but plenty of money and lots of family members to help because they all had kids young and the generations are stacked fairly close together. The main drawback is that each of those children will go on to lead the same lifestyle which is abhorrent in affluent white American culture but I have to admit there are some definite advantages to it.
Standard educated American culture pushes the preferred childbearing years for people, especially women, so late in the biological window that it is risky in lots of different ways. You see 40 year old celebrities having their first child in the magazines but you rarely hear what they had to go through to pull that off. For females there is a decent chance that they had to go for donated eggs which makes the child as biologically theirs as any random kid on the street. There is nothing morally wrong with that but I don’t think that is what most people would have hoped for in the beginning.
It is a shame we can’t come up with a system that allows for earlier childbearing without being judged into the waste heap of society.
No, you wouldn’t be. You’d be the “close family nearby” preparing for the arrival of your grandchild–a child you’d feel as responsible for and as invested in as your own child, but without the control over the timing or the parentage or really much of anything. In many ways, it would be a tighter kibosh on your career plans because you can’t just throw a grandchild on your hip and head out to live in the bush the way you could with your own child.
I know this is an extreme views thread, but it disturbs me a little how many people seem to support eugenics: forced birth control/sterilization, parenting licenses, etc. People being poor not being allowed kids -which in the US would be effectively racist. You’d probably have to have the right political and religious views too. Forbidding people who want to be parents to be so is just as bad as forcing women to carry children to term they don’t want á la the pro-lifers, IMO.
Maybe. In my particular case, it might be different. My mother desperately wanted more kids, and was going through the craziness of trying to adopt when I was in my teens. I think she would have welcomed any new baby in the family pretty warmly. As for me- well, who knows what my life would be like if I had kids younger? Maybe I’d also be all for having more grandkids young. Or maybe my kid would want to hold off.
There are just so many more workable ways to have a family than the “ideal.”
The practical and financial side all the way. Someone so mentally disabled they must live in a supervised environment should not be allowed to reproduce. Actually, all my opinions on parenting permitd ultimately stem from the fact that most people can’t have and raise children completely independent of financial help from the rest of society. Becaue it takes a village, the village’s opinions on whether or not children should be borne should be weighed against the individuals right to reproduce.
I’m having the opposite reaction for the same reasons. Whenever I read a barn-burner of a debate on the Dope I always think it’s a perfect example of why we should have an extremely limited central government.
Sounds like you have made up your mind, no matter what the arguments.
Really? I find myself getting more laid back and open the older I get. I have some strong opinions but I truly don’t want my way to be the only way.
I know it’s sappy but I’d like to see us move toward a more “live and let live” system, I think a less centralized government is a good way to get there.
I believe that the only thing you can be totally, 100% sure of is the existence of our own perception.
At least I can only be 100% sure of my own perception… I can’t speak for others.
People should be taxed according to their Body Mass Index.
Care to explain how so?
Take literacy requirements for voting; then multiply that by 100.
Since black people are disproportionally poor in the US, preventing poor people from reproducing would severely reduce the black population. No, not all black people are poor nor are all poor people black. You’ll probably give me some bootstrappy counter argument, or that Asians do well or something. Whatever. It’s still effectively racist against black people if you try to stop poor people from reproducing in the US.
If it was put into effect then one pretty obvious outcome I can see is that the number of poor black people would be reduce, meaning that black people wouldn’t be a disproportionately poor demographic any more. Given how a lot of poverty can be entrenched geographically and/or inter-generationally despite the best efforts of individually, possibly this isn’t a bad thing.
I don’t know, I don’t live in the US so don’t really care one way or the other.
This isn’t the thread for debates but I don’t think the pro-eugenics people are targeting any particular race so it isn’t racist by definition. They are advocating some type of means testing which would hit the white Jerry Springer crowd but not Oprah or the Obamas. Some people really do just advocate restrictions on poor people regardless of color.