I sincerely hope bad comes to you for this comment. By the way, if you have a problem with it, my email is mikefrandsen@hotmail.com and my number is 240-643-1900.

Now I don’t believe we, as a society, can mandate that people with certain susceptibilities or “defects” don’t procreate. But at the same time we have to accept that when they do procreate those traits become more prevalent and we become weaker as a species.

By the way Paul White, comparing what PL said to others who want to control breeding based on religion, ethnicity, etc. is asinine. They’re not even close to the same thing. The latter is based on misconceptions, stereotypes and prejudice. The former is fodder for an interesting ethical debate.

Let’s take a highly simplified example: say you have two people who are fully aware that they have relatively low IQs, but are nonetheless contributors to society in some say, and they are proud of that (and rightfully so). But their children are also relatively likely to have low IQs as well, and thus aren’t improving the world’s genetic pool in that respect.

Would you say that, for the sake of the rest of the world, they should choose not to have children? After all, those children are going to be contributing to an overpopulation problem, where the resources they consume could be consumed by children with “greater mental capacity.”

Would you say that? And where is the logical conclusion? Because to stick with IQ as a completely arbitrary measure, nearly anyone on earth could look around and say, “You know what, there’s another pair that could produce better children, so we should forgo our children so that the world’s resources can be optimized for use by the “best” children.”

I ask genuinely where the line is…what circumstances render a couple’s decision to have children “selfish”?

Paperlions, I support your comment!

Let me all you haters this; if you had HIV/AIDS, would you have children? They’d be born with HIV/AIDS as well. Really, its not as different as you might think.

Second thing is that you have to wonder who is being selfish here. Do you think the children would not like to have been born even if a 50% chance of kidney failure? Do you think their brothers and sisters, given the choice would have picked a second kidney over having sibling? By saying that this is “not the choice I would have made” you are putting social pressure on a family who already had to make a difficult decision, only so you can take the moral higher ground in an effort to create what you believe is a better world for yourself. If they can afford the surguries from their own finances, then it seems to me a bit selfish to complain about them overcrowding your world.

but don’t anyone concern themselves about 2050 when a billion people are without secure access to clean water. or other issues like climate change or energy consumption or anything else that requires sacrifice and coordinated effort to address.

I know people who have done this for others, and I know people who’ve been the recipient of that type of kindness. There is no other thing that has given me more hope for humanity than that act. Mostly everything else we humans do kinda says the opposite, but that’s a whole other conversation isn’t it?

Too bad your parents didn’t have the wisdom of your logic.