I should be horrified, but... I've always thought such a thing would be awesome for musicians. I'm a happily mediocre cellist, but what if I would have been a knock-out harpist, or a hardcore trumpeter? I'll never know!!!
When they make a test gauging finger dexterity, breath control, and embrouchure, sign me up. Except I already know my kids will play double bass or trombone, because I spent too many years as an orchestra manager with eighty thousand violinists and nary a trombone for miles.
If Varsity Blues has taught me anything, it's that every decent-hearted American deserves to know whether or not their child can vicariously fulfill their parents' adolescent desires for glory and regional immortality.
"Congratulations Mr. & Mrs. Johnson, after testing your child we discovered that he will excel in almost any sport or competition, that you place him in. He is flush with the DB gene."
"DB gene?"
"Douche Bag. Yes sir, merely by taking this test you've proved to us that this child will be raised in a no-holds-barred environment where he will be forced to win no matter what the cost. He'll be a prick, but he'll be a successful prick."
Parents are too worked up over this crap. A similar type story came through on Deadspin a few weeks back... Anyhow, what bothers the hell out of me is the parents keeping their kids from even starting school until they are a bit older just so that they can be larger than their peers and therefor more competitive.
Stupid stuff. How does it feel to graduate High School at 22?
Let's also be clear about something. Eugenics is the study of controlled breeding of people to create a better race.
This is individual people making a choice to not give birth to a child with a very serious genetic defect.
It's a totally different scale. If you think that things like Down's syndrome are natural, that they are provided for us by whatever power exists in the universe, then why are we out there curing cancer, and fixing holes in baby hearts. Why don't we simply allow heart-hole babies to die?
This whole argument is silly. The whole anti-abortion argument is silly because the wording in the bible which is used to prohibit abortion is simply incompatible with the genetic explanation of how a being is created. And the catholic church simply cannot reconcile the real world reality to the existence of the soul without making a fundamental change in how they view the soul-body attachment.
Just do your own thing. The church will catch up in about 400 years.
I'd argue that people with Down's are a drain on the parents and the state. Most people with Down's can be highly functional and vitiman treatment studies have shown that a kid with Down's doesn't necessarily equate to the child having a lower IQ if they get treatment in infancy.
@Final - God Save the President-Elect-Elect.: many people with Down's also have very low functionality and physical health complications like compromised immune systems, heart defects and stunted growth. i'm a lefty left leftist who thinks the state should be providing health care on a universal basis and that more resources should go towards all kinds of matters of public welfare, so i'm not about to condemn people for bringing retarded life into the world, should they so choose - i actually am more likely to criticize for bringing new life in whatsoever, regardless of mental states, we're all pretty much equally nasty drains on the environment, i'm not so concerned about draining the state, i think that's what it's there for. but i think it's great for people who don't think they have the patience or disposition to raise a retarded child to be able to make the decision not to bring one into the world if they find they have a choice about it.
too many people seem to have babies because they've been guilted by pro-life shit, not because they really and truly want one (we're expecting one in my family like that, yay). i wish they wouldn't.
It is eugenics, in the simple definition of the term.
As usual, I will buck the IO9 commenter trend and remark that this is positively awful.
People talk ignorantly about slippery slopes all of the time. Well, guess what? *This is* a slippery slope, and we're all sliding down it.
As long as abortion is legal and endorsed, any and every reason can be used to justify its use. There's no ethical dilemma here-- Downs Syndrome diagnosis is bad, of course you can abort the pregnancy. You can have an abortion for simply feeling too bad about your morning, no medical diagnosis required.
The problem here, of course, is whether we shouldn't have children with defects. Well, who defines the defect?
I'll be the first to acknowledge that a child with Down's has it harder than most. But to claim that they "need lifelong care and supervision" is incorrect. They need to be raised by loving and dedicated parents, yes, but they are not invalids who at the age of 18 suddenly become unproductive wards of the state.
If we used "drain on resources" as the sole determinant of the value of a human being, than we might as well kill off all the poor people who pay no income taxes and collect welfare. Or immediately put to death anyone who suffers a paralyzing spinal injury, for they'll be just as much-- natch, *more*-- of a drain on society than any adult living with Down's.
As for fascist arguments, you can leave the state entirely out of this and still find yourself in any number of fascist scenarios.
Here's one easy one: in this wonderful eugenic future, how will you get health insurance for a Down's child? If there is a test to determine whether a fetus has Down's, then I can easily see many health insurers decide they won't cover children (or adults) born with Down's. After all, you could have had the test, and had the abortion-- but you made the choice, so you have to live with it.
At least here in America, we can buy our health insurance, so presumably there will still be a market for "faith baby" insurance. But what about rationed health care systems that can't pay for everything? Hell, Canada and Britain already make you suffer in line to have life-saving surgeries and don't scoff a moment-- how do you think those systems will react to genetic screening?
It won't be a "choice," folks-- it'll be a requirement. And not just for pregnancies, but for everyone alive. The only way you'll get treated is if you're tested-- but the test will tell you (and the state, and the insurers) who is liable to get what. You won't be an insurance risk any longer, you'll be an insurance *certainty*, and thus ineligble for coverage.
We treat human life as disposable at our peril. When we regard the weakest among us only as liabilities or burdens, we eradicate civilization's bulwark against totalitarianism and barbarism.
For someone, somewhere is *always* stronger than the strongest man or woman. This day you may judge people with Down's Syndrome as less deserving than you to live. Tomorrow, someone else may judge the same of you.
@Daveinva: Bravo! Great post! I say next up are the lefties! People that go through life as left-handed writers will have it harder than most. Let's test for and abort lefties before birth! I wonder what percentage of IO9ers would be missing if we did this years ago.
I think one of the craziest ways to look at this is the "wanted" versus "unwanted" baby dilemma. If a woman is pregnant and wants the baby, but is murdered, the murderer faces two counts of murder in most states (for the woman and the baby). However the same woman could walk into a doctor's office at any time during her pregnancy and terminate the same pregnancy, no questions asked, just because she did not want it. How F'ed up is that? Is the baby, in utero, less of a human life just because it was not wanted?
Abortion is an ethical crime of convenience, a crime of a culture that values sexual freedom and open promiscuity more than human life. It is a crime that continues because as a society we are too worried about our own selfishness and not worried about responsibility.
@Daveinva: Every time you post something which you think is a well thought out argument, but which is actually silly and viciously judgmental, I figure out that you're younger than I thought you were. Right now you're about 15. Just so you know.
@geekzilla: "In most states?" Well, after the pro-life lobby discovered that they needed to build up a jurisprudence. It's the exact same thing as the Schavio incident - it serves a legal end. It's not an undiluted historical fact. Whether it's murder or not is a legal fiction - to either resolution of the question.
The rest of the discussion can stand, but that's a bit wobbly.
For the reasons so above noted, it doesn't. However, this is also why, say, Fahrenheit 451 is a much more relevant dystopia than 1984: the question isn't whether Big Brother is watching, it's whether there's any difference from that and when everyone is watching Big Brother.
To wit, if we can get everyone to voluntarily do something that's the functional equal, is that different than state enforcement? Better than state enforcement? @Belabras' reference to Gattaca is highly relevant, because it's a SF picture of a society where this problem is realize. No one's enforcing the rules for genetic engineering, just all of us together upon ourselves.
And what scares me about that future is our criteria for selection. I don't know that impressing our criteria on top of what's already there is a grand idea. I know how fashion, fad, and fable can deeply capture the human mind. But I don't really know how to stop it.
And what really worries me, oddly, is the exact opposite. Eugenics is about creating a better - or let's say more viable - next generation, a process that is always going on naturally. This only speeds it up. But how fast? What happens when we get to the point where the next generation is uniformly just plain better than the previous generation?
I do also want to note that, for all this handwringing, I can't imagine a scenario where I didn't opt for all the testing and wouldn't terminate in such a situation.
Speaking as someone whose more or less neutral on the topic of abortion; isn't it a bit more morally dubious to abort a fetus just because it is an inconvenience, rather than if their was a valid medical reason? If so then the majority of abortion preformed today are arguably more unethical than this new Danish system. Once again I'm not really in either camp when it comes to abortion, I'm just offering my opinion.
@Captain_Fitz: "a bit more morally dubious to abort a fetus just because it is an inconvenience, rather than if their was a valid medical reason?"
Absolutely, couldnt agree more.
A fetus is either;
a) Sentient, alive...an enity unto itself. If this is the case it should not be killed for any reason other then to protect another life.
or
b) The fetus is, at this stage, just a lump of meat, and using it for any purpose is moraly fine. (as long as the mother consents and no harm is done to her, of course).
Honestly, I cant stand either the Pro-life or the Pro-choice camps because they seem to miss this very simple point. They cant have it both ways.
If its self-ware, then choice dosnt come into it. It has its own rights, end of story.
If it isnt,self-aware then it isnt killing to do anything to the foetus.
And that especially includes stopping it coming to a point where it would be self aware, or using it as research to help save others.
@twDarkflame: I'm unaware of where I have been inconsistent. That has been my argument regarding the abortion debate since I learned about the abortion debate. If it alive, it is an independent being, you don't get to abort it just because it was conceived during a rape. If it's not self-aware, you can remove it and fry it for breakfast.
For the record, I fall into the latter camp. Until the baby's actually a baby and not a tumor, you can treat it, well, pretty much like you would any other tumor.
I don't think that really makes as much sense as you think it does. A goldfish is alive and marginally self aware, but there's really only a pretty extreme moral case against killing goldfish. Chickens are sort of self aware, and nobody could (reasonably) argue that dogs and cats and pigs aren't at least somewhat conscious.
There's a compromise there - which is that it's fine to kill pigs and chickens and cows to meat your desires, (That's a typo, but I'm leaving it.) but not for the joy of killing them.
The "stated" argument of the abortion debate is whether there is an moral difference between potentiality and actuality. That's a MUCH harder question - if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you be justified? What if you taught him how to paint people and he might not become a genocidal madman? Would you still be justified in killing him?
The ACTUAL argument of the abortion debate is whether or not brown people should be allowed to have sex. That's why there's all this talk of "responsibility" and "abstinence" from the "pro-coat-hanger" crowd, and lots of talk about understanding and "empathy" from the baby-killers. The abortion debate speaks more about racial and socio-economic proclivities than the sexual variety. The Pro-lifers think it's all a bunch of welfare queens who can't keep it in their pants, and the Pro-choicers things it's all a bunch of confused teenagers who made a totally understandable mistake.
12/02/08
12/02/08
12/01/08
When they make a test gauging finger dexterity, breath control, and embrouchure, sign me up. Except I already know my kids will play double bass or trombone, because I spent too many years as an orchestra manager with eighty thousand violinists and nary a trombone for miles.
12/01/08
12/01/08
12/01/08
12/01/08
oh, and that Aiihh donn wan yer liife!!
12/01/08
"DB gene?"
"Douche Bag. Yes sir, merely by taking this test you've proved to us that this child will be raised in a no-holds-barred environment where he will be forced to win no matter what the cost. He'll be a prick, but he'll be a successful prick."
12/01/08
12/01/08
12/01/08
Stupid stuff. How does it feel to graduate High School at 22?
12/02/08
12/01/08
Soccer
Hockey
Baseball
Football
Tennis
and be too short for competitive swimming.
Only alleged sport they might have a chance?
Aside from video games, it would be cross country running.
12/02/08
Or, hang them from the closet, bat-like, overnight, with lead weights attached. :)
12/01/08
This is individual people making a choice to not give birth to a child with a very serious genetic defect.
It's a totally different scale. If you think that things like Down's syndrome are natural, that they are provided for us by whatever power exists in the universe, then why are we out there curing cancer, and fixing holes in baby hearts. Why don't we simply allow heart-hole babies to die?
This whole argument is silly. The whole anti-abortion argument is silly because the wording in the bible which is used to prohibit abortion is simply incompatible with the genetic explanation of how a being is created. And the catholic church simply cannot reconcile the real world reality to the existence of the soul without making a fundamental change in how they view the soul-body attachment.
Just do your own thing. The church will catch up in about 400 years.
12/01/08
12/01/08
too many people seem to have babies because they've been guilted by pro-life shit, not because they really and truly want one (we're expecting one in my family like that, yay). i wish they wouldn't.
12/01/08
So why is it being allowed to live?
12/01/08
12/03/08
12/01/08
As usual, I will buck the IO9 commenter trend and remark that this is positively awful.
People talk ignorantly about slippery slopes all of the time. Well, guess what? *This is* a slippery slope, and we're all sliding down it.
As long as abortion is legal and endorsed, any and every reason can be used to justify its use. There's no ethical dilemma here-- Downs Syndrome diagnosis is bad, of course you can abort the pregnancy. You can have an abortion for simply feeling too bad about your morning, no medical diagnosis required.
The problem here, of course, is whether we shouldn't have children with defects. Well, who defines the defect?
I'll be the first to acknowledge that a child with Down's has it harder than most. But to claim that they "need lifelong care and supervision" is incorrect. They need to be raised by loving and dedicated parents, yes, but they are not invalids who at the age of 18 suddenly become unproductive wards of the state.
If we used "drain on resources" as the sole determinant of the value of a human being, than we might as well kill off all the poor people who pay no income taxes and collect welfare. Or immediately put to death anyone who suffers a paralyzing spinal injury, for they'll be just as much-- natch, *more*-- of a drain on society than any adult living with Down's.
As for fascist arguments, you can leave the state entirely out of this and still find yourself in any number of fascist scenarios.
Here's one easy one: in this wonderful eugenic future, how will you get health insurance for a Down's child? If there is a test to determine whether a fetus has Down's, then I can easily see many health insurers decide they won't cover children (or adults) born with Down's. After all, you could have had the test, and had the abortion-- but you made the choice, so you have to live with it.
At least here in America, we can buy our health insurance, so presumably there will still be a market for "faith baby" insurance. But what about rationed health care systems that can't pay for everything? Hell, Canada and Britain already make you suffer in line to have life-saving surgeries and don't scoff a moment-- how do you think those systems will react to genetic screening?
It won't be a "choice," folks-- it'll be a requirement. And not just for pregnancies, but for everyone alive. The only way you'll get treated is if you're tested-- but the test will tell you (and the state, and the insurers) who is liable to get what. You won't be an insurance risk any longer, you'll be an insurance *certainty*, and thus ineligble for coverage.
We treat human life as disposable at our peril. When we regard the weakest among us only as liabilities or burdens, we eradicate civilization's bulwark against totalitarianism and barbarism.
For someone, somewhere is *always* stronger than the strongest man or woman. This day you may judge people with Down's Syndrome as less deserving than you to live. Tomorrow, someone else may judge the same of you.
12/01/08
Bravo! Great post! I say next up are the lefties! People that go through life as left-handed writers will have it harder than most. Let's test for and abort lefties before birth! I wonder what percentage of IO9ers would be missing if we did this years ago.
I think one of the craziest ways to look at this is the "wanted" versus "unwanted" baby dilemma. If a woman is pregnant and wants the baby, but is murdered, the murderer faces two counts of murder in most states (for the woman and the baby). However the same woman could walk into a doctor's office at any time during her pregnancy and terminate the same pregnancy, no questions asked, just because she did not want it. How F'ed up is that? Is the baby, in utero, less of a human life just because it was not wanted?
Abortion is an ethical crime of convenience, a crime of a culture that values sexual freedom and open promiscuity more than human life. It is a crime that continues because as a society we are too worried about our own selfishness and not worried about responsibility.
12/01/08
12/01/08
The rest of the discussion can stand, but that's a bit wobbly.
12/01/08
For the reasons so above noted, it doesn't. However, this is also why, say, Fahrenheit 451 is a much more relevant dystopia than 1984: the question isn't whether Big Brother is watching, it's whether there's any difference from that and when everyone is watching Big Brother.
To wit, if we can get everyone to voluntarily do something that's the functional equal, is that different than state enforcement? Better than state enforcement? @Belabras' reference to Gattaca is highly relevant, because it's a SF picture of a society where this problem is realize. No one's enforcing the rules for genetic engineering, just all of us together upon ourselves.
And what scares me about that future is our criteria for selection. I don't know that impressing our criteria on top of what's already there is a grand idea. I know how fashion, fad, and fable can deeply capture the human mind. But I don't really know how to stop it.
And what really worries me, oddly, is the exact opposite. Eugenics is about creating a better - or let's say more viable - next generation, a process that is always going on naturally. This only speeds it up. But how fast? What happens when we get to the point where the next generation is uniformly just plain better than the previous generation?
I do also want to note that, for all this handwringing, I can't imagine a scenario where I didn't opt for all the testing and wouldn't terminate in such a situation.
12/01/08
12/01/08
Absolutely, couldnt agree more.
A fetus is either;
a) Sentient, alive...an enity unto itself. If this is the case it should not be killed for any reason other then to protect another life.
or
b) The fetus is, at this stage, just a lump of meat, and using it for any purpose is moraly fine. (as long as the mother consents and no harm is done to her, of course).
Honestly, I cant stand either the Pro-life or the Pro-choice camps because they seem to miss this very simple point. They cant have it both ways.
If its self-ware, then choice dosnt come into it. It has its own rights, end of story.
If it isnt,self-aware then it isnt killing to do anything to the foetus.
And that especially includes stopping it coming to a point where it would be self aware, or using it as research to help save others.
I dont mind what people believe, frankly.
But I just wish they were consistent!
12/01/08
For the record, I fall into the latter camp. Until the baby's actually a baby and not a tumor, you can treat it, well, pretty much like you would any other tumor.
12/01/08
I don't think that really makes as much sense as you think it does. A goldfish is alive and marginally self aware, but there's really only a pretty extreme moral case against killing goldfish. Chickens are sort of self aware, and nobody could (reasonably) argue that dogs and cats and pigs aren't at least somewhat conscious.
There's a compromise there - which is that it's fine to kill pigs and chickens and cows to meat your desires, (That's a typo, but I'm leaving it.) but not for the joy of killing them.
The "stated" argument of the abortion debate is whether there is an moral difference between potentiality and actuality. That's a MUCH harder question - if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you be justified? What if you taught him how to paint people and he might not become a genocidal madman? Would you still be justified in killing him?
The ACTUAL argument of the abortion debate is whether or not brown people should be allowed to have sex. That's why there's all this talk of "responsibility" and "abstinence" from the "pro-coat-hanger" crowd, and lots of talk about understanding and "empathy" from the baby-killers. The abortion debate speaks more about racial and socio-economic proclivities than the sexual variety. The Pro-lifers think it's all a bunch of welfare queens who can't keep it in their pants, and the Pro-choicers things it's all a bunch of confused teenagers who made a totally understandable mistake.
12/01/08