"They should not be allowed to breed..."

[fpb]

Anyone can say anything in a fit of anger. But to make such a claim in deadly earnest shows that you want to be God, deciding who lives and who doesn't - and that is the Devil's posture. Plus, on the practical side, you are postulating a state bureaucracy to decide who is allowed to breed and who is too - moronic, diseased, drugged, whatever - to have children. One doesn't have to be a state-hater to see that this is a very bad idea indeed.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

As I said - anyone can say anything in a fit of anger. But look at Beethoven's family background and you will find that there is one person who would certainly have been aborted (or not been allowed to exist) under the "they shouldn't be allowed to breed" attitude. And he is not the only one.

[verity-forsythe.livejournal.com]

On a less elevated level, I have personally known a coupe of lovely people who came from godawful homes. Not, you know, geniuses or anything--just good people, people without whom the world would have been diminished.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is at the heart of what I am saying. I have seen the old fallacy that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" disproved dozens of times.

[verity-forsythe.livejournal.com]

As have I--well, not dozens, but disproven, and quite decisively.
And I suspect that there are some traits which, though capable of producing hellish effects in some people, can be expressed in a completely different way in their children. The sensitivity and slight impatience that might make one person a surly alcoholic could find its proper compassionate expression in his son, for instance. (I have actually known one person of whom this was true--he was, in many fundamental ways, just like his father. But his father was an angry bastard; the son wasn't.)