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comment by OftenBen
OftenBen  ·  2665 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Long, Slow Death of Religion

    your afraid to admit you think people should be sterilized

Except, I don't think this. But I don't get to decide what you think of me, or believe that I believe.

Spend some time in a NICU or PICU unit. Talk to the parents of a kid who died of Tay-Sachs or Harlequin Ichthyosis. You and rd95 and Quatrarius all go do that. Then please come tell me that you feel exactly the same way you do now about conscious genetic choices.





Quatrarius  ·  2665 days ago  ·  link  ·  

everybody that disagrees with me is dumb

oyster  ·  2665 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Okay, so then lay out exactly how you think we can achieve fewer sick babies. How are we going to stop people, with the current technology we have, from having sick babies without forcing anything ?

It is sad babies are born sick, it's sad children get cancer. You know what's also sad ? Baby girls being mutilated because the Chinese government thought they could step in and tell people how to reproduce.

OftenBen  ·  2665 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Education is the first part, as rd95 talks about. The more educated a populace, the lower the birthrate in general, which helps. But 'education' means more than basic K-12 stuff, it includes sex education, and not abstinence based sex ed either, but actual science based lessons on how human reproduction works and how to avoid conception. And that's unfortunately controversial.

Soon, genetic testing will be cheap enough that large-scale genetic analysis of the general population will be possible, and more people will know what kind of risks they undertake when they choose to get pregnant.

But I don't know how to change someones mind about having a baby if they are likely to produce a sick one. Typically, people don't decide to have kids, they just sort of happen. I'd like to see more people make the choice I have, and consciously decide to not pass on identified pathological genes. I don't know what arguments would persuade someone who had consciously decided to have kids anyway, knowing they could make them lethally ill.

oyster  ·  2665 days ago  ·  link  ·  

So basically you have absolutely no idea how to make it happen.