"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

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

But my fascist side thinks this every time I learn about parents who sell their children for drugs (and the creatures who buy them). The children who are killed or die from neglect put me in a similar state. And when I was fighting post-partum depression, I considered myself one of "them" every time I left my child in daycare to go to work. And I was leaving the babies with grandparents or the best daycare I could find. (Great caregivers who were more able to care for my child, objectively, than I was.) Children really are remarkably resilient.

[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.

Coincidentally,

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

This-->
http://community.livejournal.com/customers_suck/28996225.html
came up on my friends list a couple of pages ago. :(

[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.

Re: Coincidentally,

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I know. But while that proves that those two should have been deprived of the child, it doesn't prove that the child itself should not have been born.

[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.)

Re: Coincidentally,

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

This is true.