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Comment by jayajay | Hacker News Reader

Half (as mentioned in article) of soon-to-be parents are not fit for the job, and a significant amount choose to defer the job via abortion or adoption. This begs the question -- should the state intervene in sexual reproduction?

Should more babies be given up to the state to be distributed to people who have earned the job title of "parent"? The amount of kids living in poverty, and/or having incompetent parents is not a trivial fraction. Should it be the duty of a civilization to engineer generations; to save these children? At what point does "a child" become the responsibility/property of everyone, and not just the responsibility/property of the biological parents?

These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.

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Or, perhaps we (the United States) as a society shouldn't be stressing out mothers in the critical first year by shoving them back to work after, what, three months (if you have good bennies)?

Or completely drain our social welfare system and establish a demand-starved economy with wealth inequality and a draconian health care system that leaves all families stressed and overworked?

Or we can go with your bullshit predetermined social darwinianism.

One of the reasons I'm glad I moved from the States to Canada. It's remarkable how once you get used to the idea of a year of parent leave (partly shareable between mother and father), business adjusts to it like any other constraint.

> These are the hard questions that no one wants to think about.

People thought about these questions a lot. It was called the eugenics movement, and such ideas were widely accepted by intellectuals, social reformers, and politicians worldwide in the early 20th century. Eugenics laws were widely implemented. There are good reasons such views became unpopular and remain so today.

You cannot credibly claim that society has avoided thinking about these questions.

Many countries, including the US, do take children from parents if the state believes the parents to be unable to be parents, often did so more aggressively in the past, and the how and when this is done is a topic under debate. Effects of various ways children are raised are also active areas of scientific study, and often topics of legal proceedings decades later.

> should the state intervene in sexual reproduction?

To advance the argument that it should, as you seem here to want to do, you need first to show that the state might plausibly do a better job than individual parents.

I eagerly await your attempt to overcome effectively all the recent historical evidence on the subject, from the Chinese one-child policy to the American eugenics movement. Good luck!

I'm not sure whether you're arguing for the Bolshevik abolition of the family, or the existing under-funded social services system of monitoring, intervention, and in extreme cases removing children from unfit parents.

No.

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