I knew that's what you meant. That's the general use of the phrase here as well. I was making an important distinction because it dramatically undermines your point.
Adoption and genetic donors are not a replacement for one's own biological child. I'm not seeing how you undermined anything, my point was that people are unable to have children in the specific sense of having their own children. Nothing you wrote disputes that.
We can argue about why it shouldn't be important for people to have their own biological children, but it seems to be true and I'm not sure you'll find many people or much evidence to the contrary. People are more attached to children that are directly related to them, and this sort of makes sense in evolutionary terms. Your genes survive better if you're emotionally attached to seeing them survive and prosper.
If your proposed law would make some people unable to legally have their own biological children, that is an issue that probably deserves at least a minimum of consideration.
Why? Elaborate on this. Why is it a crime to give a child Huntington's after it is born vs. before it is born. I know your answer on this is based on what's below, but you'll probably not be surprised that it is wholly unconvincing to me.
Mate, I wrote 560 words in the next part below that elaborating on the difference between situations where there are different possible outcomes based on a person's actions versus situations where there is only one possible outcome regardless of action.
If you don't understand, tell me what you don't get and I'll try and explain better. If you find it unconvincing, tell me why so that we can discuss it. Don't tell me "write more" when I already wrote a buttload.
Yet, you still choose to create that kid with that disorder. The disorder is harming that kid.
And this is why a clear definition of "harm" is so important. I've explained at great length why I don't think this is harm, and why this is an innate part of that particular person. Yes, a person with Huntington's or another genetic disorder is going to have a profoundly harder time than a genetically typical person, but that is who that person is.
The choices are have a kid who will have a tough life, or not have the kid at all. And both of those seem like defensible positions to me. We're not arguing that poor people in third world countries shouldn't have kids because they'll have to work in sweat shops and probably die young of stepping on a mine or something. They'll have a much harder life than you or me in a first world country, but that's not sufficient reason to deny them life outright.
If I wanted to get cute, I could start talking about how the kid born to the woman who does drugs during pregnancy could never have existed any other way because that kid is going to be born to that mom who was a drug user. Take away her decision to do drugs, and she's a different person.
No. That's not how free will and choice works. This whole discussion is premised on the assumption that you have free will and the ability to choose. The mother can make her choice of how she behaves, and the impact of her choices on her child is what we're discussing.
Hell the particular genetic combination may have been influenced by drug use in the first place. Different sperm survives the swim due to the lack of presence of cocaine, and suddenly it's a different kid.
This seems like a massive reach, but okay, let's look at it.
This is why I think you start by sorting out the case where the genetic disorder is detected after pregnancy and the choice is to abort or not. If you can reason your way through that, then you apply the same reason to the risks pre-pregnancy. Those risks can include known genetic disorders in the parents, and external factors that might have an effect like drugs or high radiation exposure.
Ultimately, this turns out to be a red herring. It doesn't change anything. Whatever factors there are that affect which sperm gets to the egg, one of them does and then that's the hypothetical child we're talking about. If factors are changed, then you scrap and restart your reasoning from the beginning with the new information instead.
In any given case you're talking about one specific and well defined set of circumstances, not a grab bag that you get to change around after the fact to invalidate the reasoning.
Bottom line, we're talking about choosing to inflict a genetic disorder (or high risk of a genetic disorder) on a kid. It does not matter if you want to identify the kid by the genetic disorder, it's still a choice to inflict that disorder on that individual.
Your choice of language is betraying that I'm still apparently not explaining this well. You cannot "inflict" a genetic disorder on this hypothetical child that we're talking about. The child comes with the genetic disorder, just like they come with blonde hair and blue eyes. It is part of them. You can choose to have that child or not, but there is no part in which the parent is actively inflicting anything on the child.
Let's put the scary inherited disorders aside and see if I can use a different group of genetically related disorders to explain this mindset better.
In the community of certain subsets of mental health disorders there is quite a lot of discussion around specifically how those disorders are perceived and treated. There's a whole group of mental health disorders like Tourettes, autism and ADHD that have at least some genetic component. They're ultimately caused by the brain being physically different to "normal" people and once they develop there isn't really any chance that they ever go away or are cured. You can manage the symptoms, you can learn coping techniques, you can modify your body's chemical makeup with drugs, but ultimately that disorder is a part of your self and you either lean into it or deal with the consequences of trying to fight your brain every single day. The consequences tend to be even more mental health problems like depression and anxiety, or destructive coping mechanisms like addiction or self-harm.
Let's take autism as our example. Neurotypical people often see symptoms of autism as problems to be fixed, and there's some pretty profoundly damaging stuff that gets done to kids that have autism in order to try and train them out of the gross symptoms. For example,
Applied Behavioural Analysis for autistic kids can be and often is done really badly. Some of it is not that dissimilar to gay conversion therapy techniques, and I doubt either one of us thinks that's a good idea.
Instead of seeing a "disease" to be "cured", the right thing to do is accept that neurodivergent kids are actually just different people. You can make accommodations where you can, and help give them skills to interact with the real world for the time when accommodations aren't available. Sometimes an autistic adult is going to have to go into a busy and crowded bank to get stuff done, and they need techniques to help them get through that in ways that a neurotypical person wouldn't even consider. This doesn't mean that they're ill or damaged, just that their brain works differently.
And so you end up with this mindset that the "disorder" is actually just a part of the person. It's not unlike if they were short and needed ladders and stools all the time. So instead of seeing autism as some harmful flaw that needs to be fixed or removed, this is just part of who they are and it means that sometimes they need a little more help than others. They may have (read: almost certainly will have) a harder road than a neurotypical, but that doesn't mean that they don't deserve a shot at enjoying life just like anyone else.
So rolling this back to the original topic, maybe we can slot one of these big ticket genetic disorders in there instead of autism. A kid with Huntington's can have a fulfilling life just like anyone else, but there are going to be differences. They may die early, or they may be one of the lucky ones who lives a normal lifespan. They may have severe symptoms and require significant care in their later years, or they may be mostly or entirely asymptomatic. And the fact is that in almost all cases they'll get a normal childhood and early adulthood before symptoms start kicking in and they have to adapt to manage that. It is not misery from the moment they're born. This is who they are, and it's part of their road through life.
Do you understand why I'm trying to steer you away from these concepts of harm and inflicting damage? They're not the only way to view the situation. They're the common way that people who don't have to personally deal with disability mistakenly view disabled people, and they tend to lead to some pretty poor outcomes for the actual disabled people.
While we're here, I'd like to propose that you switch out Huntington's as your core example. It's really just not that bad, and it doesn't at all line up with the idea that the parents are signing their child up for a life that cannot help but be awful.
I think a better example is something like
lissencephaly (which I only know about because my landlord just happened to send me an email for a fundraiser for a local girl that has it, I'd never heard of it before). Sez Wikipedia
"Many individuals remain in a 3–5 month developmental level. Life expectancy is short and many children with lissencephaly will die before the age of 10. Some children with lissencephaly will be able to roll over, sit, reach for objects, and smile socially."
Now that sounds :censored:ing rough. I think there's a much stronger argument for not giving birth to a child with a disorder like this that will never let them develop into a functional human being and will spend basically all of their short life just fighting to stay alive.
But still, that is them. How do you balance how much suffering and difficulty is reasonable for whatever joy someone may get from simply being alive? How do you say with authority "no, you will have too much of a bad time, you don't even get to try"? And this is why you need to be able to be specific about what it is that you're using to determine that someone would be better off not existing than being born.
Also, suicide can't necessarily undo the harm. We could get further cute about the ways that suicide could undo harm in other crimes as well, but it's not an escape route in this case or those.
Again, it becomes about the harm. I keep asking you to be more specific about this.
What is harm to you?
What harm is a Huntington's child having inflicted on them?
How would their life be different if this harm was not inflicted?
Suicide can't undo harm, but it's a way to stop harm at any point that is directly comparable to the "solution" that is being proposed pre-pregnancy or during pregnancy. People do kill themselves because their lives are so miserable that they would rather simply not be. That is them making their own choice, rather than some authority figure who has never experienced what they experience making it for them.
The existence of suicide as an option means that we can have something between "no birth at all" and "an entire life of misery". It's a way off Mr. Bones Wild Ride, and so you can potentially have "no birth" versus "some misery + the individual gets to choose whether to continue". It is absolutely an escape route for those who wish to use it.
I place a lot of value on individuals getting to choose for themselves, particularly with regards to whether they exist or not. That seems like a good one to get to have a say in.
So I think based on the above you can see how there is an argument that it's not that specific child. But beyond that, you don't know how the child would have been born without the drug use. You don't even know for sure if the child would have been born without the drug use, perhaps drug use was integral to conception. Alternative histories or timelines are not particularly helpful or relevant here. What we do know is that a child is born with specific harm, and that this harm occurred as a direct result of the negligent decisions of the mother.
What? What do you mean it's not that specific child? You asked me a question about a specific child in a situation that you spelled out. If the situation is different, then maybe my opinion is different.
Come on, man. You're not Dotini to be flip flopping your hypotheticals around. You know better than to try and take my narrow response to one highly specific question and try to spread it as if it applies to everything. You've written multiple posts about
steelmanning. I'm doing my best to try and understand where you're coming from an explain how my opinion differs on a very slippery subject (and not doing very well it would seem), and it feels like you're looking for ways to undermine me rather than engage with what I'm trying to say. Help a brother out.
And yeah, in that specific case there was harm (and harm in the particular way that I spent 560 words defining it) caused by the mother. I don't think we agree on what constitutes harm, and so I'd appreciate at some point if you'd spend a little time explaining more about how your definition of harm differs from mine.
