You know that it's still completely legal to use corporal punishment on your children, right? Schools aren't permitted to do so, but parents still are.
I know right-wing nutjobs love to bleat on and on about how terrible it is that you can't give your child a good smack, but it simply isn't true. You're not allowed to beat them to the point where they suffer serious injuries, but parents have never been allowed to do that anyway -- attempted infanticide has generally been regarded as a criminal act by the majority of western societies since time immemorial.
Most of these people are actually quite stupid (not unlike the morally healthy populaton). But the stupid ones don't last long; sooner or later they get themselves killed or land in prison or juvie. The smart ones last longer, and are vastly more effective at accomplishing the things that they set their minds too; as a result, they leave much deeper impressions on others. Not unlike the way that serial killers, despite being FANTASTICALLY rare, are much more well known than your garden-variety heat-of-the-moment-and-bad-judgement murderer.
If the woman's description was any indication, the kid was a genuine sociopath. No amount of punishment can deter a sociopath -- that's one of their defining traits. They just do whatever strikes their fancy, with absolutely no thought to the consequences. They can lie their way out of almost anything; the fact that they have perfect poker-faces makes this problem particularly acute -- sociopaths don't really display much emotion at all, although they're more than happy to display fake emotions in order to manipulate others.
Are you fucking stupid? He said that as part of an attempt to get off the hook, and to get all kinds of media attention. And you fell for it like a geriatric in the bathtub.
How are the parents not responsible for the nature aspect of the child? If anything, they're MORE responsible for the nature side, since only about 1 or 2 new mutations in Child's entire genome are NOT inherited from the parents. The parents chose to pass on their shitty genes. They didn't choose all the random nonsense that happened after the child was born.
If you don't think this is a fair assessment, keep in mind that parents are totally comfortable taking credit for the genetic component of a child's intelligence, or for their attractive physical features. You can't really have it both ways. If the parents are responsible for the good genes, they're just as responsible for the bad ones.
If you think that would do any good, you just go back to hitting the bong and being a good little moron.
Okay, you get the prize of for best snappy line in the discussion.:)
I don't know where people get the idea that letting kids run wild like animals will result in them behaving any differently than animals. The incorrectness of that view seems almost tautological.
We ARE our mental chemistry, and Humans are not different than animals any more than apples are different than fruit. Unless you posit the existence of ghosts that can manipulate the electrical fields of the brain somehow, which is just fucking stupid.
Choice and free will aren't even illusory -- the concepts don't even make sense to begin with. And it's ridiculous to suggest that the denial of free will implies that we can't summarily exterminate those who are destructive to the rest of us. It's no different than a pack of rats ganging up on the one rat that goes around biting the rest of them.
Actually, psychiatry contradicts the notion of there being multiple causes of APD. There seems to be a single mechanism that is responsible for understanding the concept of consequences -- both consequences to self and consequences to others -- and for being able to feel basic empathy. Empathy and the ability to understand consequences both seem to be deeply linked on some level. Psychiatric research has generally demonstrated that without this particular set of feedback systems to guide our behaviour, we end up being in the ways that are referred to as antisocial.
I wish I had a reference on hand, because the paper I read about this was absolutely fascinating; it got right into the neurophysiology of the system in question.
The first thing they tell you on the first day of biology 100 is that there is no general definition of life. You can define it within certain contexts (ie: when is a Human "alive", when is a bacteria "alive"), but there is no general definition whatsoever.
Check ANY biology text for an introductory biology course. The first section of the first chapter will be dedicated to the difficulty of defining what "life" is.
Nevertheless, in the context of whether a Human is alive -- and thus possessing of the right to not be vacuumed-aspirated or curetagged -- foetuses don't make the grade. That's the whole point here.
To summarize: there is no general definition of life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is too stupid to be taken seriously, and has never actually studied the matter in question.
Think hard, and maybe try reading a book, before you answer.
It turns out that most of the eye and all red blood cells are incapable of those things. They don't react to stimuli and they don't metabolize. They don't even have DNA or a nucleus. In fact, 99.99% of all the cells in the Human body can't reproduce in any fashion whatsoever without severe mutations that -- by definition -- render them cancerous.
So no, those are crappy definitions of life and would get you laughed out of any biology classroom in the English-speaking world.
Feotuses don't even fit the definition. They are inanimate, and they are neither vital nor functional.
That's true, it really isn't saying much. Comparing your healthcare system to that of nations where things like sanitation aren't real popular yet... doesn't really mean much.
The fact is, as long as citizens aren't free to handle their own healthcare (ie: I can't pick up some morphine for an associate who is in pain, or buy a copy of gray's anatomy and perform any surgery I like), the government is responsible for guaranteeing the quality of healthcare. And that means doing certain things, like ensuring that the poor can get affordable access to treatment, that doctors aren't writing unnecessary prescriptions and performing unnecessary surgeries, etc.
Those things would be fine if there was true competition and freedom. If I can perform appendectomies for people too poor to go the ER, then there's no issue. They can get their surgeries from whoever seems most reliable and offers the best price. If I'm allowed to make codeine in my basement lab, then there's no need for the government to regulate drug prices. As long as we DON'T have those freedoms, healthcare has got to be heavily regulated to guarantee that I can get codeine when I need it and that those poor folk can get appendectomies without having to sell their remaining organs to cover the cost.
I'm not sure you know what you're talking about. Do you talk about killing a kidney or killing a wad of ass fat? Of course not. They're not alive in the sense that those expressions would be referring to. You destroy tissue, you don't kill it. And a foetus is essentially just a collection of tissues in the woman's body.
The term "biological life" is utterly meaningless. There is no general definition of "life". So when you use that word, it is always contextual. Alive does NOT have a common definition (can you supply one that actually includes all the things that are usually considered to be living organisms?)
When it comes to the notion of killing things, we are referring to autonoymous multicellular organisms. A foetus is not autonymous in any sense. It is only alive as a chunk of another being's body. Like a wart or a colorectal polyp.
So in other words, you DO want treatment. You want treatment for the negative symptoms of the disease. You DO want your brain and personality changed -- the parts of it responsible for the negative symptoms. That's really no different than any other disorder. Depressives don't want to loser their biting, cynical senses of humour. Bipolar folks would like to hang onto the surges of energy that they experience. People with Grave's disease would like to retain their ridiculously high levels of productivity.
The fact is though, that for most disorders, the high functioning group is small and marginal. That's what makes it a disorder. There are lots of people who wish they didn't have depression, who wish they could hear, who wish they could function normally in society. Yet I've never heard a single person regret that they're NOT deaf, that they're NOT autistic, that they're NOT bipolar (I bet lots of people wish they could have mild Grave's disease though; I know that it will actually be induced in depressives sometimes as a form of treatment). If we were to someday start treating autistic spectrum disorders at birth, as implied in the article, do you think anyone would regret that they have a fully functioning set of social skills and the ability to interact with the outside world?
It's not alive in the Human sense. It may be alive in the sense that bacteria are alive or that your kidney is alive. But in the sense that a Human is alive, it's simply not. It's not dead either. Foetuses simply don't fall within the range of things to which the concept of Human life can be applied.
Since when can children make decisions about their lives? They don't get a choice about anything else. They don't get to choose whether they go to school or not, no matter how much violence and abuse they could spare themselves by not attending. They don't get to decide whether they can drink or not, or whether they can smoke or not. They can't decide that they don't like their parents and would like to live apart from them. They can't vote. They can't even own a gun to protect themselves.
Children DON'T get a say in ANYTHING. It would be nice if they did (I sure would have liked to have some choices about the things that happened to me as a child), but that's not the world we live in. A two year old or a three-year-old can't really make meaningful decisions. An eight-year-old doesn't really understand what it will mean to spend their life unemployable in a society that sees social assistance as evil and wrong-minded. And if we gave fifteen-year-olds control and choice over their lives? An awful lot of them wouldn't make it to eighteen.
I actually have read quite a bit about bipolar disorder, since every time I see a new doctor, for the first ten minutes they usually assume that I'm bipolar. No real correlation to creativity. There IS a strong correlation with starting large, ambitious projects and never finishing them. All that does is make any existing creativity that the person has seem overly apparent. Not unlike the way that when people in the autistic spectrum have extraordinary mathematical talents, they're so overly apparent that people assume that autism itself is the cause, even though some normal people have identical skills.
Monsters with no hope?! Where did I say THAT? I think you're reading your into prejudices into this issue.
To address your point... since you're disagreeing with me, what you are saying is that bipolar disorder ISN'T actually a disorder, and that we should deny treatment for it to children? Because, you know, it's actually great and they should learn to like it? That it's just the way they're born and trying to change it would be bad? That's messed up.
Let's be clear -- adults are free (or should be free) to not accept treatment for any condition they want. Children don't really get that choice. Other people are deciding for them. And letting the tiny handful of people that enjoy their disabilities to dictate that those children should be have to retain their affliction is monstrous.
So I guess I am calling some people monsters -- the people that want to force children to remain afflicted with conditions that will most likely result in lifetimes of unhappiness, underemployment, time in group homes and psychiatric hospitals, etc. Take a look at all the homeless people in any major city that are there because they have a disability that they can't get treated.
Incidentally, lots of people can pull all-nighters with ease. Delayed-sleep-phase syndrome is one potential reason. It causes people to get a sudden burst of energy in the late evening. Go meet some programmers some time -- an awful lot of them are like that. And lots of people are creative. Attributing these things to being bipolar is just ridiculous. And it's DEFINITELY not a reason to deny treatment to children.
Any definition of life is contextual. Obviously, a human and a bacteria are in absolutely no way alive by the same definition. So we need a definition of when a Human is alive or not alive.
Humans are generally considered dead when their brain no longer sends the signals necessary to keep the body functioning, or when the organ systems are incapable of responding to those signals.
Foetuses don't have working brains or organ systems until the 28th week, although in rare cases they have been viable as early as the 20th week. Before this time, premature delivery of the foetus will invariably result in the foetuses death, despite any and all efforts to keep it alive. Humans are not even remotely viable until 20 weeks into development. Before that time, they are no different than someone who has died -- neither their brains nor their organ systems function.
So our definition for a Human being alive is that they need a functioning brain, and a sufficiently functioning set of organ systems such that they can survive (even if that survival requires intensive medical intervention). Corpses and foetuses don't satisfy this definition.
Now let's have your definition. Preferably one not involving any references to magic, deities, astrological convergences, or other imaginary phenomena.
You obviously feel rather strongly about this -- when do YOU believe that a foetus becomes "alive"? Five minutes after fertilization, when the odds of successfully making it to delivery are about 1 in a 100? How about after two weeks, when the odds of successfully making it to delivery are still only around 60%? How about after 15 weeks, when the foetus still doesn't have a functioning set of organs or a usable brain? I'd say the lack of a working brain makes a foetus not-particularly alive, especially since most real-world evidence suggests that a working brain is necessary if one expects to not be dead.
No one cares that a foetus LOOKS human after 11 weeks. Corpses look Human too. So do mannequins. Looking Human doesn't mean anything. The lack of a brain or functional organ systems is rather more telling, and in that regard a foetus at 11 weeks is much more like a corpse or a mannequin than it is like an actual Human.
Incidentally, there's a HUGE difference between killing people Down's syndrome and aborting a foetus. One is killing a living being with thoughts and feelings, the other is excising a tumour-like growth from the uterus. That's the problem with anti-abortion sociopaths -- they can't seem to tell the difference between an unfeeling lump of tissue and a relatively fully-formed individual. That's what leads them to do all the stupid, inane things they do, like comparing the aborting of embryos (which have a 30%-40% chance of aborting by themselves anyway) to the holocaust (which involved people that had an incredibly low chance of gassing and incinerating themselves). See the difference?
If one foetus -- just one, that's all I'm asking for -- asks to not be killed, I'll accede that they're people. Hell, if one would just put up a bit of a fight. Even cows and tapeworms will occasionally resist when you try to kill them. What do foetuses do? They autoabort, they grow into the endothelium and kill the mother, they develop in the abdominal cavity killing the mother, they grow with their heart on the outside of the body, etc. Foetuses are about as far from being meaningfully alive as it's possible to be, short of being like, a rock or something.
I actually used to be against abortion. Then I actually studied some developmental biology. It was interesting to learn that up to 80% of fertilized eggs aren't viable, and that as many as half of those that ARE viable simply fail to implant, fail to develop, or whatever else,... all simply by chance.
If foetuses are Humans, then Human life is cheap and worthless. The idea that 80% to 90% of Humans don't make it past their first five minutes of life (the time between fertilization and death) doesn't really mesh well with the idea that life is a precious gift that is worthy of preservation and respect.
Besides, how is a foetus even remotely alive? It's brain doesn't work, it's organs don't function, it's blood doesn't flow. It It has none of the qualities associated with being alive, other than in the sense that we consider tumours to be alive.
How is autism any different than depression or schizophrenia? Treat the schizophrenia, and the person you have at the end of the day is COMPLETELY different than they were before treatment. The same goes for someone with depression or bipolar disorder, for someone with OCD, or any other psychiatric disability. When you treat a psychiatric disorder, you change the person by definition.
Children DESERVE to be able to be social, to be able to play sports, etc. If they CHOOSE not to be social, if they CHOOSE not to engage in sports, that's their perogative. What you're suggesting is that they be denied the choice because of simple biological misfortune. No offence, but fuck you. Fuck you right in the face, asshole.
Being disabled -- lacking the ability to do something completely -- is NOT a personality trait. It's a horrendous misfortune.
You can't kill something that's not alive. And a foetus doesn't meet any of the requirements of being alive. A foetus has less resemblance to an actual living Human than a tapeworm does -- and no one feels the least bit bad about expunging a tapeworm from the body.
The point about Down's syndrome was simply to illustrate how silly some people are about trying to make everything into a wonderful gift. And frankly, I don't see anything wrong with choosing abortion over being sentenced to a life of hard labour taking care of a grotesque parody of Humanity.
Hey, I like your deliberate attempt to confuse people about the meaning of the word "theory" with regards to science. Not disingenuous at all.
Doesn't it bother you at all to be exploiting people's ignorance about science in order to convince them that it's okay for you to drive an SUV? Just accept it -- buying an SUV was a stupid, selfish, small-minded thing for you to do. Grow up and move on.
This is really one of those things that is completely illusory. A few people in the autistic spectrum have extraordinary skills, in much the same way that a few regular people do. It's just that in autistic people, there isn't any personality to get in the way, so those skills are really really obvious.
There are healthy people with Savant-level mathematical skills. But no one really cares. But in someone with no real personality, someone who doesn't have conversations, someone who doesn't do any of the normal things that we're all used to, the extraordinary skills are the only things left to notice.
It's like walking into an empty white room that has a pornographic magazine sitting on the floor. The magazine will probably be the only thing you notice. But if you walk into a normal teenage boy's bedroom, there could be dozens of pornographics magazines lying around and you'll probably never notice them because your attention is being taken up by a few slices of moldy pizza, mounds of dirty clothes, the poster of Caprica-6 on the wall, the Slayer CD playing at 95 dB, and the precarious tower of empty soda cans that contains enough aluminum to jumpstart a small nation's airplane industry.
Hey, it's YOUR retarded commercial healthcare system. You COULD have voted for a government that would ban Rx kickbacks and advertising by pharmaceutical companies directly to doctors. But you didn't, presumably because you WANTED the current system.
Always keep this in mind: things are the way they are precisely because people want it that way. If they wanted things to be different, it's entirely within their power to change. All they have to do is stop being idiots for the 0.4 seconds it takes to put a check-mark in a box on a ballot slip.
Yeah, but there are comparable shitstorms anytime you attempt to cure a disability.
There was some deaf kid, and when doctors discovered that his hearing could be restored surgically, the deaf community freaked right out. Apparently some people have started to think of deafness as some wonderful gift that makes them unique and special, rather than as the hideous disability that it really is.
I've even started hearing about people who regard Down's syndrome as a legitimate form of Human variability, rather than as a compelling argument in favour of offering all pregnant middle-aged women free abdominocentesis and karyotyping.
Speaking as someone who has a disability (APD in this case), anyone who would try to force children to live with a disability despite the availability of treatment is someone that is in desperate need of a bullet-related attitude-adjustment. Forcing a child to live their lives without a sense of hearing, or with autistism, or with any other treatable disability, is truely criminal.
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I know right-wing nutjobs love to bleat on and on about how terrible it is that you can't give your child a good smack, but it simply isn't true. You're not allowed to beat them to the point where they suffer serious injuries, but parents have never been allowed to do that anyway -- attempted infanticide has generally been regarded as a criminal act by the majority of western societies since time immemorial.
Most of these people are actually quite stupid (not unlike the morally healthy populaton). But the stupid ones don't last long; sooner or later they get themselves killed or land in prison or juvie. The smart ones last longer, and are vastly more effective at accomplishing the things that they set their minds too; as a result, they leave much deeper impressions on others. Not unlike the way that serial killers, despite being FANTASTICALLY rare, are much more well known than your garden-variety heat-of-the-moment-and-bad-judgement murderer.
If the woman's description was any indication, the kid was a genuine sociopath. No amount of punishment can deter a sociopath -- that's one of their defining traits. They just do whatever strikes their fancy, with absolutely no thought to the consequences. They can lie their way out of almost anything; the fact that they have perfect poker-faces makes this problem particularly acute -- sociopaths don't really display much emotion at all, although they're more than happy to display fake emotions in order to manipulate others.
Are you fucking stupid? He said that as part of an attempt to get off the hook, and to get all kinds of media attention. And you fell for it like a geriatric in the bathtub.
If you don't think this is a fair assessment, keep in mind that parents are totally comfortable taking credit for the genetic component of a child's intelligence, or for their attractive physical features. You can't really have it both ways. If the parents are responsible for the good genes, they're just as responsible for the bad ones.
I don't know where people get the idea that letting kids run wild like animals will result in them behaving any differently than animals. The incorrectness of that view seems almost tautological.
-- Mark
Choice and free will aren't even illusory -- the concepts don't even make sense to begin with. And it's ridiculous to suggest that the denial of free will implies that we can't summarily exterminate those who are destructive to the rest of us. It's no different than a pack of rats ganging up on the one rat that goes around biting the rest of them.
I wish I had a reference on hand, because the paper I read about this was absolutely fascinating; it got right into the neurophysiology of the system in question.
Check ANY biology text for an introductory biology course. The first section of the first chapter will be dedicated to the difficulty of defining what "life" is.
Nevertheless, in the context of whether a Human is alive -- and thus possessing of the right to not be vacuumed-aspirated or curetagged -- foetuses don't make the grade. That's the whole point here.
To summarize: there is no general definition of life. Anyone who tells you otherwise is too stupid to be taken seriously, and has never actually studied the matter in question.
Think hard, and maybe try reading a book, before you answer.
It turns out that most of the eye and all red blood cells are incapable of those things. They don't react to stimuli and they don't metabolize. They don't even have DNA or a nucleus. In fact, 99.99% of all the cells in the Human body can't reproduce in any fashion whatsoever without severe mutations that -- by definition -- render them cancerous.
So no, those are crappy definitions of life and would get you laughed out of any biology classroom in the English-speaking world.
Feotuses don't even fit the definition. They are inanimate, and they are neither vital nor functional.
The fact is, as long as citizens aren't free to handle their own healthcare (ie: I can't pick up some morphine for an associate who is in pain, or buy a copy of gray's anatomy and perform any surgery I like), the government is responsible for guaranteeing the quality of healthcare. And that means doing certain things, like ensuring that the poor can get affordable access to treatment, that doctors aren't writing unnecessary prescriptions and performing unnecessary surgeries, etc.
Those things would be fine if there was true competition and freedom. If I can perform appendectomies for people too poor to go the ER, then there's no issue. They can get their surgeries from whoever seems most reliable and offers the best price. If I'm allowed to make codeine in my basement lab, then there's no need for the government to regulate drug prices. As long as we DON'T have those freedoms, healthcare has got to be heavily regulated to guarantee that I can get codeine when I need it and that those poor folk can get appendectomies without having to sell their remaining organs to cover the cost.
The term "biological life" is utterly meaningless. There is no general definition of "life". So when you use that word, it is always contextual. Alive does NOT have a common definition (can you supply one that actually includes all the things that are usually considered to be living organisms?)
When it comes to the notion of killing things, we are referring to autonoymous multicellular organisms. A foetus is not autonymous in any sense. It is only alive as a chunk of another being's body. Like a wart or a colorectal polyp.
The fact is though, that for most disorders, the high functioning group is small and marginal. That's what makes it a disorder. There are lots of people who wish they didn't have depression, who wish they could hear, who wish they could function normally in society. Yet I've never heard a single person regret that they're NOT deaf, that they're NOT autistic, that they're NOT bipolar (I bet lots of people wish they could have mild Grave's disease though; I know that it will actually be induced in depressives sometimes as a form of treatment). If we were to someday start treating autistic spectrum disorders at birth, as implied in the article, do you think anyone would regret that they have a fully functioning set of social skills and the ability to interact with the outside world?
It's not alive in the Human sense. It may be alive in the sense that bacteria are alive or that your kidney is alive. But in the sense that a Human is alive, it's simply not. It's not dead either. Foetuses simply don't fall within the range of things to which the concept of Human life can be applied.
Children DON'T get a say in ANYTHING. It would be nice if they did (I sure would have liked to have some choices about the things that happened to me as a child), but that's not the world we live in. A two year old or a three-year-old can't really make meaningful decisions. An eight-year-old doesn't really understand what it will mean to spend their life unemployable in a society that sees social assistance as evil and wrong-minded. And if we gave fifteen-year-olds control and choice over their lives? An awful lot of them wouldn't make it to eighteen.
I actually have read quite a bit about bipolar disorder, since every time I see a new doctor, for the first ten minutes they usually assume that I'm bipolar. No real correlation to creativity. There IS a strong correlation with starting large, ambitious projects and never finishing them. All that does is make any existing creativity that the person has seem overly apparent. Not unlike the way that when people in the autistic spectrum have extraordinary mathematical talents, they're so overly apparent that people assume that autism itself is the cause, even though some normal people have identical skills.
To address your point ... since you're disagreeing with me, what you are saying is that bipolar disorder ISN'T actually a disorder, and that we should deny treatment for it to children? Because, you know, it's actually great and they should learn to like it? That it's just the way they're born and trying to change it would be bad? That's messed up.
Let's be clear -- adults are free (or should be free) to not accept treatment for any condition they want. Children don't really get that choice. Other people are deciding for them. And letting the tiny handful of people that enjoy their disabilities to dictate that those children should be have to retain their affliction is monstrous.
So I guess I am calling some people monsters -- the people that want to force children to remain afflicted with conditions that will most likely result in lifetimes of unhappiness, underemployment, time in group homes and psychiatric hospitals, etc. Take a look at all the homeless people in any major city that are there because they have a disability that they can't get treated.
Incidentally, lots of people can pull all-nighters with ease. Delayed-sleep-phase syndrome is one potential reason. It causes people to get a sudden burst of energy in the late evening. Go meet some programmers some time -- an awful lot of them are like that. And lots of people are creative. Attributing these things to being bipolar is just ridiculous. And it's DEFINITELY not a reason to deny treatment to children.
Now let's have your definition. Preferably one not involving any references to magic, deities, astrological convergences, or other imaginary phenomena.
No one cares that a foetus LOOKS human after 11 weeks. Corpses look Human too. So do mannequins. Looking Human doesn't mean anything. The lack of a brain or functional organ systems is rather more telling, and in that regard a foetus at 11 weeks is much more like a corpse or a mannequin than it is like an actual Human.
Incidentally, there's a HUGE difference between killing people Down's syndrome and aborting a foetus. One is killing a living being with thoughts and feelings, the other is excising a tumour-like growth from the uterus. That's the problem with anti-abortion sociopaths -- they can't seem to tell the difference between an unfeeling lump of tissue and a relatively fully-formed individual. That's what leads them to do all the stupid, inane things they do, like comparing the aborting of embryos (which have a 30%-40% chance of aborting by themselves anyway) to the holocaust (which involved people that had an incredibly low chance of gassing and incinerating themselves). See the difference?
If one foetus -- just one, that's all I'm asking for -- asks to not be killed, I'll accede that they're people. Hell, if one would just put up a bit of a fight. Even cows and tapeworms will occasionally resist when you try to kill them. What do foetuses do? They autoabort, they grow into the endothelium and kill the mother, they develop in the abdominal cavity killing the mother, they grow with their heart on the outside of the body, etc. Foetuses are about as far from being meaningfully alive as it's possible to be, short of being like, a rock or something.
I actually used to be against abortion. Then I actually studied some developmental biology. It was interesting to learn that up to 80% of fertilized eggs aren't viable, and that as many as half of those that ARE viable simply fail to implant, fail to develop, or whatever else, ... all simply by chance.
If foetuses are Humans, then Human life is cheap and worthless. The idea that 80% to 90% of Humans don't make it past their first five minutes of life (the time between fertilization and death) doesn't really mesh well with the idea that life is a precious gift that is worthy of preservation and respect.
Besides, how is a foetus even remotely alive? It's brain doesn't work, it's organs don't function, it's blood doesn't flow. It It has none of the qualities associated with being alive, other than in the sense that we consider tumours to be alive.
Children DESERVE to be able to be social, to be able to play sports, etc. If they CHOOSE not to be social, if they CHOOSE not to engage in sports, that's their perogative. What you're suggesting is that they be denied the choice because of simple biological misfortune. No offence, but fuck you. Fuck you right in the face, asshole.
Being disabled -- lacking the ability to do something completely -- is NOT a personality trait. It's a horrendous misfortune.
The point about Down's syndrome was simply to illustrate how silly some people are about trying to make everything into a wonderful gift. And frankly, I don't see anything wrong with choosing abortion over being sentenced to a life of hard labour taking care of a grotesque parody of Humanity.
Doesn't it bother you at all to be exploiting people's ignorance about science in order to convince them that it's okay for you to drive an SUV? Just accept it -- buying an SUV was a stupid, selfish, small-minded thing for you to do. Grow up and move on.
There are healthy people with Savant-level mathematical skills. But no one really cares. But in someone with no real personality, someone who doesn't have conversations, someone who doesn't do any of the normal things that we're all used to, the extraordinary skills are the only things left to notice.
It's like walking into an empty white room that has a pornographic magazine sitting on the floor. The magazine will probably be the only thing you notice. But if you walk into a normal teenage boy's bedroom, there could be dozens of pornographics magazines lying around and you'll probably never notice them because your attention is being taken up by a few slices of moldy pizza, mounds of dirty clothes, the poster of Caprica-6 on the wall, the Slayer CD playing at 95 dB, and the precarious tower of empty soda cans that contains enough aluminum to jumpstart a small nation's airplane industry.
Always keep this in mind: things are the way they are precisely because people want it that way. If they wanted things to be different, it's entirely within their power to change. All they have to do is stop being idiots for the 0.4 seconds it takes to put a check-mark in a box on a ballot slip.
There was some deaf kid, and when doctors discovered that his hearing could be restored surgically, the deaf community freaked right out. Apparently some people have started to think of deafness as some wonderful gift that makes them unique and special, rather than as the hideous disability that it really is.
I've even started hearing about people who regard Down's syndrome as a legitimate form of Human variability, rather than as a compelling argument in favour of offering all pregnant middle-aged women free abdominocentesis and karyotyping.
Speaking as someone who has a disability (APD in this case), anyone who would try to force children to live with a disability despite the availability of treatment is someone that is in desperate need of a bullet-related attitude-adjustment. Forcing a child to live their lives without a sense of hearing, or with autistism, or with any other treatable disability, is truely criminal.