Most of they bring to the world is random rage, unspeakable fluids, and unpleasant interactions.
But I guess driving past safari style is fine.
a) all who have learnt about the situation before birth and chose abortion,
b) all who gave the kid away to some institution.
A N == 1 case from my life. My classmate had a Down kid at 20 - very rare, as Down is not typical in young mothers. She seems to be happy, even though she sacrificed her dream of a bigger family for him; it was so challenging having a Down kid that she didn't have any other.
But the father absconded and wants nothing to have with his disabled son.
A different N==1, a friend and coworker of mine had a son with DS at 23. He's now the oldest of six children. They're doing great, and he's a terrific big brother.
I think the studies matter because N needs to equal more than 1 to get a sense of how it goes for the people who do it.
Whereas some children might get into a mood and be ok after an hour, he does not unless his environment is changed.
He will literally scream or moan non stop for 6-8 hours (yes you read that right, and it's no exaggeration). He would do this when in environments he doesn't recognise, so imagine an airplane, imagine a restaurant, imagine a trip out...
We can't do those things anymore because of the actual judgement we get from other people (oh and I could write a post on this alone).
Then, when we return him to the car to drive home, his behaviour instantly turns to a smile and blowing raspberries.
We also can't get respite, our parents are too old, friends don't feel right babysitting, council services won't yet see him as old enough or have no availability, so it leaves us hiring privately, which is expensive, difficult and low availability.
Of course this takes its toll on our mental health, his sibling and us.
So on one hand I'm pleased it can soon be stopped for others, but on the other it makes up my son's behaviour, who I absolutely love regardless of the impact he has on us without realising, because there are times when you will see the stereotypical love and happiness when it is unexpected.
But I would not say I have greater happiness.
I've got a 13 year old daughter with DS. We don't have 6 hours of screaming but she has definitely thrown her share of hissy fits. My personal favorite was driving into my son's snooty private boy's school while she was sitting in the back without a shirt on (She was 12 at the time).
Or the time she decided to sit down in the middle of a busy street while we were trying to cross it and we ended up dragging her across the road skinning her feet and almost getting hit by a truck.
Usually she is happy and has tons of personality but it really does make things harder at times.
I should probably add my that my usual comment when anyone asks is that having a kid with DS sucks but not as badly as a lot of other disabilities.
Can you point to any that you have read?
- Parents: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3353148/pdf/nihms37...
- People who have DS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3740159/pdf/nihms37...
- Siblings of people with DS: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajmg.c.30101
Definitely no sampling bias here... And given that the vast majority of people who do prenatal screening decide not to have a child with Down Syndrome, I don't think the people who choose to have a Down Syndrome child are really representative of prospective parents as a whole.
The revealed preference is clear, particularly in places like Iceland where prenatal screening is ubiquitous. They have effectively eradicated Down Syndrome going forward.
Why on EARTH would the opinions of people who were so scared of the experience that they never tried it at all even for a minute be relevant to that perspective?
Also, people who have had negative experiences raising a child with Down Syndrome are presumably far less likely to be involved with non-profit organizations related to Down Syndrome.
The fact that you'd be crushed at a depth of (IDK, 2km or so?) underwater doesn't make "swimming" unhealthy.
My concern with eugenics is that it's a thing which various groups of extremely narrow-minded bigots push for to promote mutually exclusive ideals, ideals which often have much the same level of biological awareness as an untrained idiot picking up a scuba kit and trying to walk from London to New York along the sea floor.
If we go slowly and carefully, if these treatments are optional and not mandatory, we might be able to build a better world without such self-righteous bigots. But this is definitely a case where we want to be slow, spreading this over multiple generations if we can, because we don't know the limits of our own ignorance.
oh boy, would we fare better with a lot of stuff if we'd consider this before releasing shit into the wild (asbestos, ptfe, plastics, AI and so on).
But I’m gay, and while there are pros and cons to it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. And I don’t think just because someone else doesn’t want to be me is a reasonable bar for eradication.
To be clear, I’m not saying the two are equivalent, just pointing out that you need a better argument than “you don’t want this for yourself or your children, right?”.
It's completely understandable to have an attachment to one's own identity, but at a certain point trying to impose that identity on one's children becomes ethically questionable. A good example is the deaf community - would it be appropriate for a deaf couple to withhold medical treatment from their child that would allow them to hear? I would argue no, but some people disagree.
It may be a corny answer, but i just would like to have them have a happy healthy life. So, i don't really mind or care if they'd be gay or not.
There’s no way in hell I’d want to select for straightness in my children. That is frankly insulting to me to even suggest.
Having Dawn syndrome is severe impairment.
Being gay isn't an impairment. At least nowadays in US. I'm not sure you would feel the same if you were gay in Chechnja ... where supposedly gays just don't exist, and when something like gay happens the family deals with him themselves (the rule there - either the family deals with their own member, or the society will deal with the whole family). Especially if it were about your children.
No. It does hold for other cases where severe impairment is present.
>My comment makes it clear I’m not comparing the two
exactly. Because your case doesn't contain severe impairment. When such an impairment is added - like say making you a father of a gay child in Chechnja where you have to commit a "honor killing" of that child to save the rest of your family - the cases become much more comparable. I'm pretty sure that in Chechnja you'd choose DNA edit to remove gay gene from your child if you're given that choice.
The way you can wildly change the answer to this by changing the age, gender and marital status of the subgroup of straight people you ask is a lot more interesting than the answer itself is.
“[A cochlear implant for my kid?] You think hearing people are better than deaf people?”
‘I’m saying it’s easier.’
“Would your life be easier if you were white?”
... Whether society is mature enough to recognize that in the presence of that treatment, Down's people will still be born and they have every bit the same dignity-of-human-life as the rest of us is a very important question.
Tiny nit, in the US it’s “Down syndrome”, not “Down’s”. Apparently we name conditions with a possessive if named for someone with it (“Lou Gehrig’s”) and without the possessive if named for, say, the person who first described the condition in a medical journal.
> Auto-eponyms may use either the possessive or non-possessive form, with the preference to use the non-possessive form for a disease named for a physician or health care professional who first described it and the possessive form in cases of a disease named for a patient (commonly, but not always, the first patient) in whom the particular disease was identified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_diseases#Aut...
This is sourced by a link to the American Association of Medical Transcriptionists, which is not a body I’d heard of but I guess have some skin in the game when it comes to the intersection of medicine and grammar. https://www.mtstars.com/word-For-eponyms-AAMT-advocates-drop...
If Nazis hadn't practiced eugenics it wouldn't have been shuned as it is today.
There's nothing wrong with eugenics in itself, just with how it's applied.
Wow, that is certainly difficult to explain.
Now abortion has become a moral imperative in some cases...
But yes, I do actually think there is a moral imperative to abort fetuses with diseases that will extremely negatively impact the life of the person and of the people who will have to care for them.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't care for them if they happen to be born, not at all, but I don't really understand how it can be controversial otherwise.
wait.. what?