Sterilizing the Handicapped

My cutoff point is at physical handicaps resulting from life experience. Losing a limb or mobility or eyesight through some incident has no bearing on your offspring. People with congenital handicaps or deformities that are reasonably certain to be passed along to the next generation are another matter entirely.

I'll even go beyond the physical and advocate that people below a certain intellectual threshold should be sterilized. Ditto for welfare moms.


I love how people glibly toss out this remark as though it automagically invalidates anything and everything associated with the era.

I'm surprised at the number of people equating sterilization with Nazis. The Nazis didn't invent it at all, and it was far more common in the world at large than people seem to think for a short time.

These eugenics programs were intended to eliminate these handicaps from the population completely. That's a farcical approach because those traits will not be eliminated via compulsory sterilization anyway. Mental handicaps are not being perpetuated in our population at a significant level by affected individuals mating, and mentally handicapped offspring are usually the product of non-handicapped parents. Therefore, sterilizing affected individuals will have little to no effect on the number of handicapped offspring being produced.

I think an expanded understanding of population genetics has made it so that basically no educated geneticist would advocate eugenics these days. It serves no purpose on top of being cruel and unusual.

WHO are the handicapped? What is an handicap compare to the "normality"? Who decide what is normality and what the handicap?
You?

Being myopic is a physical handicap, and it is an hereditary trait too. So we want to sterilize myopic people?

Treating handicapped people as a homogenous group is totally ridiculous, given the right criteria just about anybody could be described as handicapped, thus giving you the right to steriilize any group of people who you don't like.

Does that sound like a good idea to you?

I am merely raising a topic for discusion.

after showing my hubby some of these post here he has brought up a very interesting topic as well to add to yours if you dont mind if i add it, he ask what should be done to the people who know that the people are retarded in the sence that they dont know what they are doing ,and dont even know where they are at mind wise retarded im speaking here, and there are women an men who have sex with them. what should be done with these people who we call normal but yet do such an act to someone who can not help them self ,a dont know what is happning to them and they become pregnent and also have a retarded child, it is called rape but even normal cases of rape nothing much is done to the rapest, so in this case why should a person be fixed just because of a[ pedifile usless human being] goin around having sex with them. could go on an on here about this subject but not wanting to high jack your thread here, just think there is 2 sides to this is all. an it gets under my skin when it seems it is easy to make the abnormal go threw somthing that the normal person should know better than to do to start with.

I think my opinion on this topic should be quite clear to anyone who has followed my posts closely, especially those on abortion.

I have a sister who is ten years younger than I who is extremely developmentally disabled. She will never write her name, though she does have a vocabulary of about fifteen sight-words which she can read and understands (danger, warning, poison, etc).

Until the doctors committed to her care finally hit on the right mix of medications about twenty years ago, Sherry was extremely self-abusive: she has suffered a concussion from banging her head and has at various times pulled out most of her hair. With her medications, she's rather dopey but at least no longer self-destructive (most of the time), although she remains highly volatile.

According to the latest judgments by the professionals who track her progress, Sherry is kind of a mixed bag. Verbally, she communicates on the level of a 4-5 year-old, but with obvious impediments and a tendency to discuss things no one else can see, but which seem to obvious and visible to her. This might be a game for her, or she might well be psychotic, no one is sure.

Emotionally, she has matured a great deal over the years, and is capable of expressing her emotions with a reasonable degree of clarity. And most (but by no means all) of her emotions seem to be legitimate responses to real events going on in her life.

Sherry is incredibly intuitive and reads people like a book. She has an uncanny ability to sense precisely how to disturb someone and delights in demonstrating this skill to the unsuspecting or wary in the most provocative way possible. Other times, she is sweet and loving (though rarely physically affectionate) and is very grateful for attention and gifts.

She has lived in a group home in Massachusetts since she was sixteen. Originally this group home was meant to house only adolescents, but as the residents grew older (and funding got scarcer), it was decided not to move them. Sherry is the only verbal member of her group home (she's the only one who can speak at all), and as a result is something of a queen-bee there.

When Sherry was fourteen she was repeatedly sexually attacked by the driver who would take her to school, after-school activities, and back home. It wasn't until her self-abuse escalated to near-suicide that this was eventually discovered. As she was physically a teen-ager, she could easily have become pregnant, which would have become a grave tragedy.

Sherry will never be capable of being a parent on an intellectual and emotional level, and pregnancy would cause her enormous harm physically (she is tiny, like my maternal grandmother: 4'8, 100 lbs). There is no way that any responsible person would insist that she carry a baby to term. And as has been proven in her case, those responsible for her well-being may not be aware that anything's amiss until it would be too late.

Personally, I'd be in favor of having Sherry fitted with some sort of IUD. Anything injected into her skin would likely be removed by her, and I'd be highly dubious of her taking the Pill, in light of all her other meds and potential side effects. As she needs general anesthesia just for a routine trip to the dentist, I'd also be concerned about her required recovery time in the event that a more permanent solution to her birth control be required.

So no, I don't believe in forced sterilization of the developmentally disabled, but in Sherry's case, I'd wish she could have a long-term birth control option. It just seems humane.

Have you seen me? I'm big. There's no fucking way you'll ever fit me in an autoclave.

Best response thus far!