Wanting to have a child who is not special needs is not an evil thing. Choosing to not bring a a child with special needs to term is not evil.
Having a special needs child can dominate your finances, your life, and the lives of your family members and already existing children. People have a right to choose what what they want out of life, especially in the context of before a child is born.
No its not.
“Choosing to not bring a a child with special needs to term is not evil.”
A huge evil. Just consider your next paragraph explaining why its not evil; it centers around how having a disabled child affects you and others. I do apologize, but I find your last paragraph frighteningly narcissistic .
But we don't stop there. The bar is considerably lower than "the kid might have problems".
The mother, exclusively, can decide whether or not she wants to proceed with the pregnancy through to birth, and she doesn't need a reason other than "I don't feel like it". All those reasons you gave are still better than "I don't fell like it", and you somehow think that those are the wrong reasons?
And yeah, it can look like "I don't feel like it" to a casual observer, but then again, it really isn't the casual observer's business. They won't know if it was planned or the result of failed birth control, if the father was/is abusive, and a myriad of other things.
And to be absolutely clear: People would try to tell me "I didn't feel like it" - nevermind that I've never wanted children. I'd have been sterilized years ago if it were readily available and cheap in the US.
The morality of that is quite vigorously contested. And even in places that have elective abortion, it’s often only available in the first trimester, while many of these tests are performed after that.
But even if we accept the notion of elective abortions, it doesn’t follow that any reason is morally acceptable. What if the parents don’t want girls, like often is the case in India and China. It’s okay to abort them? What if we had an in vitro test for sexual orientation? Would it be okay to abort fetuses in that basis?
That being said, if there was a test for ADHD and I knew what the odds were that my child would have ADHD, as someone with ADHD I would seriously consider whether or not I wanted to have kids or subject another human to that.
So, I don't think it's necessarily wrong, in some universe, but there's a line between adversities for which you can still overcome and thrive (the ones you listed) versus the sorts of things prenatal tests check for where, if they do have these conditions they are either dead on arrival, dead soon after, will wish they were dead for most of their lives, or at the very least will never be a contributing member of society.
I don't think the comparison you draw is fair.
I hear you say you have ADHD yourself - each case is different and such, but you're posting on HN and I'd say that puts you far above the rest of society. Sure there are challenges but it can also be a kick-arse superpower; learn to embrace it, and most of all be grateful for the things you have achieved.
If anything it has opened my mind about the beauty of a diverse society. There is more to life than a strict adherence to some notion of what it means to be successful.
I've done pretty well for myself even though I've also had some rather hard times - no diagnosis or help existed in the 70s/80s. Then again, people will face hardships in the most unexpected ways so if anything it's made me more resilient.
With the extremely low confidence factor in some of the conditions, this genetic testing is dangerous and unethical on so many levels.
“Your child has an extra chromosome and will probably never live independently” feels deeply different than “your child has a gene variant that subtly affects their brain in ways that make it harder to focus in certain circumstances, and also probably in dozens of other ways that we don’t understand, and also many very successful people have this variant and it’s possible it even contributed to their success”. A society that routinely aborts children in the second case is starting to tilt into wild dystopia.
Not that we’ve identified such a gene, as far as I know.
If this is just a coded abortion debate... Count me out
But if it's the latter... Parents have been "selecting" children of the "right" race, eye color, height, etc for millenia... It's called "being attracted to certain physical characteristics over others" and it's really quite pedestrian.
ADHD, depression, and schizophrenia all appear to have a strong genetic component. I think most people would definitely weigh the knowledge of their partner's family's mental health history when they decide who to have children with.
I mean, don't you think people should have the moral right to select their own mates, free from coercion? I think most people would consider that to be an absolute human right, and anything less would be morally condoning rape.
This is eugenism, with its adherents lacking the moral clarity of the of early 20th century eugenists - at leasts they honest about what they were doing!
Most people don't want to die and leave behind someone who can't care for themselves.
Parenting is an enormous time investment and families that take on the burden of raising disabled children almost universally reduce their family size. This is not a decision without cost, to those who lose their chance at life.
Why do adults get to be rescued by modern medicine and not children ?
