I wonder if / how long it will be before parents have the technical means—if not the legal right—to alter their child to be gay or straight through gene therapy. Or even simply selectively bring to term one orientation or the other.
My point is that the choice will be easy for some to ignore their dictates that "abortion is abhorrent" and might choose to abort a "gay baby" because they fear homosexuality more than keeping their ideals.
But if you're going to accuse someone of hypocrisy I think you should be a bit more specific about exactly who you are accusing.
The idea of aborting a baby due to their likely sexuality is as horrifying to me as sex-selective abortion. I don't view this as a quandry whatsoever.
Since were in the realm of hypothetical, I would like to ask you a question.
If we manage to identify homosexuality as a genetic disorder, and we determined that there was a 99.999% chance that your children would be homosexual, what would you do?
It seems more fair to me if I bear the burden of my moral framework, given the proposed determinism.
Of course, this is sophistry; ask about whether two celibate gay men would be allowed a Catholic wedding and the answer will be no because they can't have children, nature of marriage, yadda yadda. Ask whether a man or woman without intact junk can get married and suddenly it's love that is really important.
I still think it's a pretty fair generalisation of traditional Christianity and the vast majority of Christians (liberal western Protestants are a minority on the global scale, and even they don't universally accept abortion and contraception, take for instance Pastor Anderson)
Would you mind elaborating more on this? It's hard to tell if you mean "avoiding sexual misconduct" as "don't rape, don't have sex outside of marriage" etc, or as "gay men must live as if they were straight". From a Buddhist perspective, the first choice seems reasonable, if a little restricting, since it's a rephrasing of the Third Moral Precept, but the second seems far too imposing on somebody else.
So without that- no contracts, no law, no real society - this is why people instinctivly yell for better morals when corruption is detected. Pressure on the outliers creates more contract-caste-conscripts. Problem solved.
A related question would be - would you have kids if under the same scenario conditions - there was a 100% chance they'd drop dead at age 10? Or 5? That potential child has a chance at life and everything wonderful and terrible it entails but not in any way that you conceive it. You'd think it horrible but maybe they'd feel grateful for the chance. Maybe they'll be the first 10 year old to cure cancer.
It's not the same thing but for it gets at the spirit of it. I mean, my child will have different problems then me. Heck, they might not even view things that I see as problems as problems. It's still my responsibility to raise them to live the best life possible as I see it and then to give them the chance to do that.
I'm keen to hear what you consider it to mean to be "opposed to homosexuality".
If you were to consider homosexuality a disordered condition (i.e. disease), then being "opposed" to it is pretty nonsensical, in the same way it would be meaningless to be "opposed" to autism or "opposed" to diabetes.
If that's not the case, then would you consider yourself to be "opposed" to it in the legal sense (homosexual acts should be illegal)? The social sense (homosexuality should be publicly shunned)? The civic sense (homosexual relationships should have no civic legitimacy)?
But if parents started aborting because they were homosexual, would there be any sort of moral/ethical issue?
Other comments have rightly commented it could be inverse (selecting for homosexuality), but I think all pro-lifers would prefer anyone being born, and allowing them to be responsible for their own soul, so that answer is easier for me to imagine.
Not more so than terminating a pregnancy for any other reason.
Usually it's for some reason that's justifiable, e.g. don't have the means to support it, don't want a child ever/at this moment in my life, teenage pregnancy, product of rape, fetus has some inherited disease, etc.
Merely dropping a child because it'll be gay, while being ok to keep another that wouldn't is not exactly of that nature.
Even the most casual reasoning for abortion ("I don't want a child, period") doesn't imply anything more, whereas this can be seen as implying you hate gay people.
By your logic, if homosexual attraction had genetic causes, could it not also be seen as "some inherited disease"?
You're doing a great deal of question begging. You're beginning with an ideological stance vis-a-vis homosexual attraction that is exactly a point of issue, and then tailoring moral arguments to suit the position. You've confused "the position that homosexual attraction is disordered" with "hating gay people" and then unjustifiably construed "hating gay people" as not entailed by the desire to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason, i.e., it's okay to terminate a pregnancy for whatever reason unless the reason is that the fetus is genetically conditioned for homosexual attraction, in which case it isn't okay because that would be an act of hate against gay people by virtue of my prior ideological commitments.
You must see the absurdity of that line of thought.
The position of sound anti-abortionists would be that no matter the characteristics of the fetus, the fetus is a human being and the killing of any innocent human being is immoral. Your position, on the other hand, seems to be very ad hoc, relying on special pleading that is driven by prior sui generis ideological commitments.
Since it doesn't affect one's capacity to live, work, perform, etc and general health, then it could be seen as such (if one was willing to) but not justifiably more than e.g. having blue eyes.
Secondly, how is terminating a pregnancy because the fetus is going to be a homosexual person different from terminating because of a specific gender of the fetus? For example, in India aborting because the fetus is female is illegal or it’s rather illegal to find the gender of the baby before he or she is born.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_and_psychology Edit: typos
And morality is all about rationalizations.
>The subjective ethical considerations depend on the context in which the decision is taken, and none of this discovery changes the context.
Of course it does, as it adds another factor one can request an abortion for -- and the preference against or for that (having a gay baby) is not morally seen as neutral as e.g. not wanting a sickle cell anemic baby.
I brought it up elsewhere, but this is an idea suggested in the book "The Forever War" as a way to control the population expansion.
I don't have a problem with (the concept) people selecting OUT homosexual children because I believe that there are people who will remain who will select them IN.
On a deeper level, I suspect that homosexuality is more complex than a few genetic markers - that there are epigenetic pressures there as well, and that there is a social/biological reason for their existence.
Homosexuality isn't a recent development, it isn't some "modern" issue. The Native Americans had a very different take on homosexuals than we do currently. Our outlook has shifted several times in the last few hundred years as well (the interwar period in Europe as an example). There are even some stunning modern examples that are rather counter intuitive to those who are ill informed (Iran and its views on trans genders).
I am not sure this is the case. In the GP comment, he took a population for whom both elements (homosexuality and abortion) are forbidden. You are not allowed to support either of them.
If you are not in that population, you can have an opinion on either element, independently.
This said, a liberal perspective for one element may (or is more likely) to also be true for the other one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_of_the_Golds_(fil...
Many people still think homosexuality is a choice, not an inherent trait. The genetic argument may just be ignored entirely.
People somehow believe stranger things about the flatness of the Earth.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1626369/ [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28608293
irony_off
While I doubt we'd see these means anytime soon, it could go either way I think: Forced abortions because of sex orientation (and who says that it'll have to be the straight people that abort homosexuals, not the other way around?) or taking a pill and become gay for some months, as you wish.
I'd assume that the usage of such products would move towards more (percieved) comfortness in life (like not being gay in teenage years, bc. some studies found you're more likely to feel bad ... but being gay in college/post-college years because higher income).
/me trying to picture two guys having an abortion
I'm not sure that'll ever be possible. Once a gene has "done its work", possibly when the fetus was in the womb, that least to homosexuality (or whatever other characteristic is of interest), then editing the genome will have less or no effect.
> Or even simply selectively bring to term one orientation or the other.
This seems a lot more doable to me.
I expect it will be possible by 2025-2030.
Much of the world is also less friendly to homosexuality, to put it lightly. I wonder if they will eliminate it entirely?
I think that 50 years ago "homosexuality" would not have been "preventable" at least in the US.
However those who were untreatable were not treated kindly - it is still the era of institutionalization. We probably would have had a far more horrific solution to the precived problem than the one you suggest.