(September 2, 2015 at 2:47 am)robvalue Wrote: I think that if we stopped siblings having children on the grounds of risk of defects, we would also have to stop anyone with a similar or higher risk of passing on serious problems. Otherwise, we're just picking on this issue.
I haven't done much research, but I would guess that allowing this would not be much of a threat given the size of populations we now have. I'd love to see more parents taking responsibility and not having kids when they know they could easily pass on medical problems (one of the reasons I'm not having kids) but singling this issue out seems wrong. I think it's a dumb thing to do, but I don't think it should be illegal.
Having kids is a pretty unregulated business, you don't have to pass any aptitude or medical tests. You don't need anyone's permission. It's ironic to me that it's the biggest, most impactful decision anyone can make yet it's the one that least gets any sort of policing.
The alternative is to run tests on parents, for parenting skills and medical stuff, and disallow certain people. This is pretty totalitarian, so what we have is the lesser of two evils I think.
I am not so sure it is the lesser of the two evils. Some of the children with genetic defects may have a different opinion on the matter. I would be pretty pissed if I had a genetic defect due to idiot parents breeding when they should have known better. It is bad enough that they caused me to exist without my consent, but making me when they knew (or should have known) that in doing so, there was a significant increased chance of terrible problems, I would want to fucking kill them.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
