Incest and children.

[KUSA]

So, to start... What's everybody's thoughts on this?

Dude if you want to bone your sister you don't need our permission.

[MTL]

Do we really need three threads about incest going on at once?

yes!  Silly!  Of course!
oh wait no we don't.

[Pyrrho]

[Losty]

[IanHulett]

[Losty]

It was a smart choice, better safe than sorry. I wasn't offended.

[robvalue]

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.

[Pyrrho]

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.

[robvalue]

Yeah, you could certainly make a case for regulated parenthood. I just cringe at what that would entail to enforce it. We already have way too many children in care, and removing any "illegal" kids would make this worse. To stop people actually doing it would require stiff penalties, and even then, accidents are going to happen. Agreeing on what is and isn't needed to be a competent parent, or a medically suitable parent would probably cause some sort of war.

The only realistic way I can see this happening is people having some kind of implant/injection at birth which renders them sterile. They then only get this block removed when they have passed a parenting test.

[Losty]

That seems like a terrible idea.