(And that's of course assuming human trials were authorized. Probably not for this treatment in my lifetime, at least not in the US).
Now factor in that the success rate of eggs turning into viable embryos that can be transferred back into the mother can be low. Even if you harvest say 10 eggs, a good catch, you may very well end up with just 1-2 viable embryos from those 10 eggs. And that's before considering trisomy as discussed here.
The final kicker is that harvesting takes time. You might well only be able to harvest a few times per year. And success rate drops quickly once you're past 38 or so.
There's no point; other trisomies won't go to term. (Sex chromosomes are an exception, but also don't make the child nonviable.)
But I will observe that when such treatments become available, such conditions become a marker of lower socioeconomic class and the people with the conditions get treated less well by society.
This is why we need a better healthcare system.
FTFY
It doesn’t seem like a very out-there interpretation of your post, maybe it is wrong, though. In particular the implication that I’ve got in parenthesis is, for sure, reading between the lines and maybe wrong.
But I don’t really get the response of “This isn’t responsive to my comment.” It doesn’t seem to move the conversation forward or clarify anything. Seems like a dead-end. What’s the point?
Given that this is also true of universal health insurance and the US government also doesn't pay for that...
All that above is to say that I wonder if some folks in Down Syndrome might actually prefer their status quo abnormal development?
Don't get me wrong, I think it'd be great if society could give these people more than poverty after their parents die, but as it stands, unless that person was born into wealth they are looking at misery when the state becomes their caretakers.
I have a child with a server mental disability, I love them pieces, but frankly what happens to them after I'm gone is one of my biggest concerns.
That's the hard reality I wish people hand wringing about the ethics of avoiding down syndrome would confront. It's one thing to call them a blessing, but are you going to push and advocate for government spending so these blessings don't end up in a hellhole when they are no longer cute children?
What are the ethics (and societal obligation) of supporting someone who’s had a severe stroke? Or how about a traumatic brain injury from a car accident? Oxygen deprivation from near drowning? If these are different from a congenital condition like DS, why?
If someone gets cancer, then yeah they should be covered such that they aren't made homeless because of their disease.
If someone has a stroke that leaves them unable to work, again a social safety net that keeps them from being homeless should be in place.
The ethics are pretty simple. It's reasonable for a good society to support those in need through force of taxation. Just like it's good for a society to keep the water clean through force of taxation and regulation. Everyone benefits or has the potential to benefit from such a universal system that protects them from circumstances outside their control.
If that is not a benefit then I'm not sure what is.
That's a benefit.
- People who have DS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3740159/pdf/nihms37...
- Siblings of people with DS: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajmg.c.30101
Cochlear implants are reversible. A genetic disease is not.
They permanently destroy hair cells of the inner ear during surgery to make direct electrical contact, so removing them won't restore your pre-implant level of hearing.
It's usually a moot point if your hearing's bad enough to be a candidate for implants, tho.
I ask because segregation like that was considered standard of care decades ago, but has not been in decades now too, so if it was recent, it's not following current best practices, and if it was long ago, it's worth noting that this is no longer the standard of care, indeed because it wasn't helpful and people would not choose it.
I’m not arguing for either side of the treatment/screening debate here, but vehemently against an apartheid-like view on how people with disabilities should be treated, i.e. not as outcasts but as fellow humans.
Reality is that the vast majority of families don’t want a facility in their neighborhood. If downs could be prevented its an overall positive outcome. I wish nothing but happiness for those already affected
Maybe you’re right and this situation was terrible for everyone. Is this arrangement required? Is it the best we can do?
I don’t think most people would choose to live a life with many common afflictions. I certainly wish my lower back didn’t hurt all the time. That doesn’t invalidate my existence, and neither does my son’s Down syndrome invalidate his.
Also they had an ambulance or fire truck there at least once every couple months.
[1] https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/adults-with-down-synd...
Misquote. The statement was "What's better for them should be the overriding concern and that's to have a normal development".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. This isn't a response to this particular comment, but to the account's overall pattern of behavior, which is way over the line.
yes, naturally, almost every post I make on my throwaways is something political, in response to existing political comments or submissions, which are evidently allowed.
using throwaways to protect oneself from the terminally online crowd is pretty much a necessity in the current year, unless your values and opinions are firmly in the middle of the Overton window. and even then, there are many opinions that were universally okay 15 years ago can be used against you now. I've seen it happen time and time again.
This makes me think that you might not have taken in the essential bit, which is the pattern of an account's behavior. Was that not clear from the above?
In case it helps, the issue is that we don't want accounts to use HN primarily for arguing about politics or ideology. That's an important test and has proven to be one of the more reliable ones, in terms of whether an account is using HN as intended or not (https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...)
Separately from that, looking at https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=123yawaworht456, I see other reasons to ban such an account—you've routinely been breaking HN's rules in plenty of ways which have nothing to do with your specific opinions. If your motivation is simply to protect yourself, as you say here, then I wonder why that would be.
I’m pretty sure most scientists would consider being able to communicate effectively with your own species, “normal”. Regardless of what animal you are. Just like it’s normal to have 5 fingers as a human. But some humans have more or less. That’s just…life.
No need to be unnecessarily sensationalist. I do agree that using the term “normal” should give someone pause. But warning bells? Depends on context…like everything in life. :)
We should not let compassion for these people obstruct some basic facts. My only consideration would be the potential risks and side effects that are to be expected for any medical intervention. But if we were expecting a child that was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, I would not hesitate for a second to give this child the chance for a normal life. And us parents the chance for normal parenthood.
Please cite your sources and show your work.
My child with Down syndrome is a giant pain in my ass, I worry about him constantly, and there are days where I wonder “why me?”
The same is 100% true about my typically-developing daughter.
Down syndrome has nothing to do with parent outcomes. Society refusing to actually provide support is the issue here.
I admit I was absolutely relieved when pre-natal screening was negative for it, both times.
But if that was the hand we were dealt, then I’d take it. But that doesn’t mean I want it.
I think at a certain point you can’t consider this stuff rationally.
All lines are arbitrary.
Yes, they can be beautiful people that bring light to others around them, but those others also don't typically get exposed to the behind the scenes struggles of the entire family to cope with this.
Some people are prepared to do this; I don't judge the ones that decide they're not. I would hate for someone to go into it not understanding what they're signing up for.
People with Down syndrome are much more likely to die from untreated and unmonitored infections than other people.
Children with Down syndrome are much more likely than other children to develop leukemia
Children with Down syndrome are more likely to have epilepsy [...] Almost half of people with Down syndrome who are older than age 50 have epilepsy.
And from this paper[2]:
Clinical research and longitudinal studies consistently estimate the lifetime risk of dementia in people with Down syndrome to be over 90%. Dementia is rare before the age of 40 years, but its incidence and prevalence exponentially increase thereafter, reaching 88–100% in persons with Down syndrome older than 65 years. [...] In a longitudinal study of adults with Down syndrome, dementia was the proximate cause of death in 70% of cases.
Saying they can have extreme health issues does not seem excessive given the above IMHO.
[1]: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/down/conditioninfo/a...
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/11/408906/survivors-childhood...
Aside from that, it is actually hard to paint an accurate picture of today with historical data for people with Down Syndrome as the childhood Trisomy 21 strategies have improved and been implemented in the past 20-30 years. 60 years ago kids with Trisomy 21 were moved into institutions. Kids 30 years ago got some basic treatments to keep them alive. Now kids get all kinds of screenings for hearing, vision, thyroid, heart conditions before problems develop. Turns out it's very difficult to grow, learn and thrive when your thyroid doesn't work, or your cardiovascular system wasn't circulating enough oxygen.
There are more struggles for sure, including intellectual disabilities, but many more kids are doing significantly better than their past generations. It costs more, is more work, but like the parent poster said, my experience certainly isn't extreme. We go to more doctor's appointments, have IEP meetings, and she's in speech therapy. She's generally been pretty healthy, happy and very active.
It was scary when she was born. We were given a pamphlet with a list of things similar to your first link. The reality though is she's more likely to have those than the general population, but some of those things are very rare. 100x very rare is still rare. Having all of those issues would be even more rare. The greater point though is that any kid can have those issues too.
The epilepsy link seems to conflict with what I've seen. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31391451/ https://www.downs-syndrome.org.uk/about-downs-syndrome/healt...
Both of those put it closer to 10% sometime in their life, with about half of those at birth.
For the record, I'm pro-choice. It's just kind of weird that people are OK with abortion but only in weird certain circumstances. I get timing--if a fetus is viable, why someone would think that's too late to make that choice. But not the motivation behind it
That baby did not have down syndrome and is now a happy seven year old.
Terminating on 1/100 without any further testing seems crazy to me. Of course, our scans and screening were all 'free' on the NHS, so there was no cost to getting extra data.
I think the doctor felt that early termination was a better result than later termination.
When he told me this story he was confused as to why they didn't start by finding out if the parents would keep the baby regardless. He saw it as a waste of resources as in their situation termination was never on the cards.
https://healthed.govt.nz/products/antenatal-screening-and-te...
I’m very pro-science but I also feel for the people with downs who are like - what? They’re going to end everyone like me in the future?
It is a hard life for everyone involved.
I used to live near a Down syndrome center where a bunch of folks lived and I remember this one lady who was kitted out with Britney Spears everything, lunchbox, t-shirt, hat, and headphones. Everyday I passed by the bus stop she would be dancing her heart out to a Britney track waiting for the bus and it made my world a little brighter.
As someone who absolutely loves to "be weird", I often wish the world was so much friendlier to folks like this (other than in a token manner).
On a serious note, if the world is a lot more accepting, it's mostly because the youngest generations are a lot more accepting, and the more bigoted among us (which tend to skew older) are slowly dying off.
Far too slowly, I might add.
Nothing went away, it just got hidden under a thin veneer.
tolerance is a peace treaty, but there are a ton of gaps in how we implement it because our default socially and politically is more-so based in privilege than co-existance.
And that applies for many definitions of "normal". A person outside the "norm", in whatever category, is accepted far less than you claim. Sometimes it may not be visible or even intended, but it's there.
There's a lot of people that have woken up to this and are loving and accepting, and sometimes it can feel like this is becoming the norm when you're able to surround yourself with that kind of person... but you're right. It isn't "the norm" it just normal enough for some lucky people.
Could you please expand on that? I have no idea what you are talking about.
I think a lot of social acceptance today is a mask. It's something people put on to virtue signal in the age of social media, and they expand their appearance of tolerance as wide as is currently socially acceptable to avoid anything being used against them in the future. You can see these masks slip occasionally.
My wife was originally born in Russia. She's lived outside the country for over 2 decades, is as little aligned with that country's politics as you can be, and is generally a very likeable charismatic person.
I've seen some incredibly "tolerant" and "accepting" people (of religious, ethnic, sexual, nationality aspects) who are unaware of her nationality spurt out the most vitriolic opinions of Russians (mostly when something relevant appears in the news), sometimes pretexted with "all" or "majority". In the environment these "tolerant" people live in, Russians are an acceptable group to hate en-masse. Many other nationalities also apply.
Many times she doesn't say anything, but when she has, you can see the mask going on in real-time. "Not all", "not you", "except you", backtracking and saving face.
If you were part of the latter, you would instantly understand why we still have a lot of work to do.
You can see this playing out in real time with religion which went from societies that were highly religious to secular to militantly anti-religious, and now gen-z is suddenly some ~400% more religious than previous generations. [1] The most interesting thing is that that's also a global trend, probably owing to the relative global homogenization of societies in many ways.
[1] - https://www.axios.com/2025/05/10/religious-young-people-chri...
>He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, "there would be a revolution."
https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
> On 2 January 1992, Yeltsin, acting as his own prime minister, began a major economic and administrative reform ordered the liberalization of foreign trade, prices, and currency. At the same time, Yeltsin followed a policy of "macroeconomic stabilization", a harsh austerity regime designed to control inflation. Under Yeltsin's stabilization programme, interest rates were raised to extremely high levels to tighten money and restrict credit. To bring state spending and revenues into balance, Yeltsin raised new taxes heavily, cut back sharply on government subsidies to industry and construction, and made steep cuts to state welfare spending.
> In early 1992, prices skyrocketed throughout Russia, and a deep credit crunch shut down many industries and brought about a protracted depression. The reforms devastated the living standards of much of the population, especially the groups dependent on Soviet-era state subsidies and welfare programs.[108] Through the 1990s, Russia's GDP fell by 50%, vast sectors of the economy were wiped out, inequality and unemployment grew dramatically, whilst incomes fell. Hyperinflation, caused by the Central Bank of Russia's loose monetary policy, wiped out many people's personal savings, and tens of millions of Russians were plunged into poverty.[109][110]
So yeah, people drank a lot and got the fuck out when they could.
>In political-left world, everybody has health care, access to housing and a liveable salary. In a political-right world, people are deported and killed, and the unlucky ones (i.e. the poor) live on the streets and can't afford to visit a doctor.
The comparable people today telling us we have have to live under constant surveillance and be subjugated by all powerful governments and government intertwined institutions and organizations or otherwise losing all our rights and practical autonomy to various collective interests don't even do us the courtesy of pretending that the goal is to everything better and nicer. They just tell us that we'll all gaslight ourselves into liking the bugs or whatever and that despite everything being worse it's somehow better because stonks up and microplastics down, or whatever other metrics they also control.
You're claiming Mao killing millions with idiotic policies (not to mention all the scapegoats he killed intentionally) was okay because he was "trying"?
Or are you talking about Stalin, Lenin, or Castro?
Who is telling you that you "have to live under constant surveillance" and so on?
You'd rather have someone run the country into the ground while lying to you about than intentions (which you're gullible enough to believe apparently, for better or worse) than not?
I have no idea what is happening in our schools these days, but obviously something is lacking.
I was born in the US, didn't have a choice!
>Around one-in-five Millennials think society would be better off if all private property were abolished.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-Finnggps7JDvgoylYYWc_onPtP...
The most fundamental problem we haven't isn't the system, but the people. It seems that all electoral systems are unable to avoid putting people in power that shouldn't be there. Look at basically every Western country and we all seem to be ruled by idiots who have no real vision for anything besides being in power. And so it's not exactly a shock that you get 'systemic' failures.
The same was true in the ancient empires with their dictators and emperors. During the time of enlightened and wise leadership they've have remarkable cities and justice that are inspiring even today. But then of course during times of power hungry hedonic idiots ruling, the societies would crumble and injustice would be ubiquitous. It was never about the system - it was always about the people. The goal should be to have a system that picks great people, but we seem yet to have discovered that. And indeed it may not exist. People that want to be in politics are the last people that should ever be allowed in politics, which poses quite the dilemma!
Doe that mean it's perfect? No, of course not, there is always room for improvement.
Conservative Muslim countries show a pattern of overwhelming male dominance in religious service attendance. At the same time, over half of the Muslims in the US are recent immigrants [1]. This raises the question to me: is the resurgence in religious service attendance among men driven primarily by a broad return to the Christian church? Or is it largely an effect of the growing Muslim population in western countries?
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/04/14/muslims-in-a...
The sex issue also seems to be just Axios' spin. By their own numbers it looks like church attendance is up 3x for women and 5x for men amongst Gen Z. Definitely a significant difference, but not really in line with their spin on the topic.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025...
To show a proper “return to religious observance” (any religion, not just Christianity) means showing a large number of people who attend religious services regularly but whose parents do not.
My hypothesis is that we’re not seeing much of a “return to religious observance” from children of parents with low/no religiosity and that nearly all of the resurgence is driven by the aforementioned religious subgroups.
Focusing on jewish women, fertility rates for different levels of religion in 2021-2023:
Ultra-orthodox 6.48
Religious 3.74
Traditional-religious 2.81
Traditional, not so religious 2.20
Not religious, secular 1.96
This also has implications for the long-term population of Earth. The claim we'll reach a "max" population sometime this century is quite silly. It'll be a local max, not a global max. Because if even a single group maintains a positive fertility rate, that group will eventually drive the population to start increasing again (and basically take ownership of the gene pool while they're at it).
There really isn’t any way to know this for a fact. The future could hold technology that allows us to expand far beyond the current population, but it also could lead to setbacks that the population never recovers from. It is reasonable to guess it’s a local max.
As an interesting factoid the Roman Empire, which for many people of the time would have had some analogs to 'the world', also had a fertility collapse prior to its end, that they tried to combat with quite strict laws, but ones which were ultimately ineffectual. Of course that was hardly the end of the story!
Is "Traditional-religious" a strict subset of "Religious"? Is Ultra-orthodox a strict subset of "Traditional-religious"? If so, it's odd that Traditional-religious has lower fertility than Religious.
You're also wrong: there were plenty of "anti-war protestors" during the Holocaust, who lost, and were wrong; plenty of radical feminists who were (and are) anti-trans; and the idea that the American Revolution was primarily about maintaining slavery has been debunked — for one thing, it was often led by Northeners who had already banned slavery. (The 1619 Project eventually conceded and issued corrections.) Environmentalist groups in the 70s doomed the planet by making it near-impossible to build nuclear energy in the US, and then later drove the US into spiraling inequality by making it near-impossible to build enough housing. Opposing eugenics was once a conservative opinion, whereas the "science" of eugenics was favored by academia — and most of the suffragettes! The largest anti-eugenics movement came from the Catholic Church.
Of course, new ideas that were better than old ideas usually came from people now termed "progressive" — the term is self-defining (if it wasn't "progress" no one would look back and call it "progressive.") But plenty of bad ideas have also come draped in the cloaks of people who term themselves progressive, and opposed by people who at the time were termed conservative: it's only in retrospect that we rewrite the people in the wrong as not-progressive, and consider the people then termed conservative as the true-progressives. Ultimately most people want good things for most people, and mainly argue — sometimes vociferously, and acrimoniously — about what the best way for that to happen is.
If you read early radfems' complaints about trans women, you'll see concerns about men infiltrating the burgeoning movement to subvert or destroy its ability to effect much-needed substantial societal improvements for women. Nowadays, internet access and 10 minutes can disabuse you of this notion – but in the past, you'd have to have talked to an out, activist trans woman (who would often adhere to a different school of feminism to you, which if anything is evidence that she is dangerous to the Cause!) or had the right zines circulated to your doorstep (not really an option until the 90s, by which time it was generally understood that Transphobia Bad, the debate was about to what extent trans women's experiences were central to the Cause ("only tangentially" versus "in every respect"), and everyone knew you could pick up a Judith Butler book from your local library), to receive evidence to the contrary.
Likewise, the Catholic Church's conservative opposition to eugenics: they raised concerns about the human rights of those subject to eugenics practices, and later added secular arguments as justification. Contrast their opposition to trans people, which is… theologically confusing, to say the least: the existence of trans people "erases differences" (Galatians 3:28), distorts the image of God (Genesis 2:22), and (I seem to remember one bishop claiming) has already killed God… somehow. (Perhaps Pontius Pilate was secretly transgender? (This is me being silly.)) The justifications are all over the place, as is characteristic of post-hoc rationalisations of Conservative bigotry: replace the vague unevidenced claims about God with vague unevidenced claims about "nature", and the Catholic claims become the same rubbish as TERF claims. (Obligatory note: many Catholics do hold coherent views on this topic: I'm talking about the overarching organisation, not the people, or even all parts of the organisation.)
Small-c conservatism is a strategy, and isn't right by accident: it's an application of the same principle as Chesterton's Fence. Capital-C Conservatism is about denying resources and happiness to perceived enemies, while harming them as much as you can rationalise while still calling yourself a good person. (There are no capital-C Conservative policies that do not involve hurting people, prohibiting social mobility, or restricting what kinds of people are allowed to exist: many of them can't possibly qualify as small-c conservative policies, because they're only "conserving" an imagined past. Anti-immigrant sentiment in North America is one example: https://xkcd.com/84/.)
To undrape the cloak, we can look at how people talk about their ideas, and how they respond to criticism. (And remember not to focus on those calling themselves "conservative". Many "progressives" are actually capital-C Conservative, with a different – but no less harmful – idealised-state-of-nature: many modern-day eugenicists work in autism "charities", promoting "progressive" torture "therapies".) Unfortunately, this does not tell us which ideas are good, and which are bad: to find that out, you have to look at reality, not study rhetoric.
Most people may want good things for most people, but many people wilfully delude themselves about what "good things" means. Those, perhaps more so than the liars, are the dangerous ones.
False dichotomy [0]. Basically a bunch of sophistry to say "all conservatism is bad."
> the existence of trans people "erases differences" (Galatians 3:28),
You can't just quote the Bible without providing a translation, and I can find no translation with this wording. I would suggest that you refrain from commenting upon other cultures that you are ignorant of, as this is a form of cultural appropriation at best, and active bigotry at worst.
Same with your supposed "quotations" of Genesis 2.
> Capital-C Conservatism is about denying resources and happiness to perceived enemies,
Apply principle of charity [1].
> [...] while harming them as much as you can rationalise while still calling yourself a good person.
> Many "progressives" are actually capital-C Conservative, with a different – but no less harmful – idealised-state-of-nature: many modern-day eugenicists work in autism "charities", promoting "progressive" torture "therapies".)
On this we can agree - I don't actually see much difference between progressives and conservatives; they all fall prey to religious and superstitious thinking. All this self-aggrandizement about how diverse and inclusive one is, all the moralizing and ethical high-horsing, is really just a series of magic incantations the progressive chants to themselves to "psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society," [2] without actually needing to do anything about the material reality. Not so different from the way the sinner takes a dunk in a bathtub of water and is now "born again, free from sin," doesn't take the Lord's name in vain, uses gender-neutral pronouns, and wears a crucifix or a Pride flag - take your pick of religious idol.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
[2] Liam Kofi Bright, "White Psychodrama." https://philpapers.org/archive/BRIWP.pdf
The quotation was from Pope Francis. The Bible reference (one of Saint Paul's letters) was me being facetious. Same with the Genesis reference: transphobic Catholics cite Genesis 1, but if you try to interpret Genesis 2 by the same logic, it says the opposite (and more definitively): the bigoted reading is eisegesis, and not even particularly good eisegesis.
For the record: I also think "my" reading of Genesis 2:22 is eisegesis. Very little of the Bible has to do with trans people specifically. Those passages of the Old Testament which do are best interpreted by an Orthodox rabbi, since they can't really be understood out of context (which hardly anyone else bothers with learning); and the few things Jesus is recorded as having said about trans people (that is, people who'd fall under the modern umbrella category "transgender") were positive; but trans people have little spiritual significance in the major Abrahamic religions (as compared to, say, Hinduism) and aren't major characters of any of the narratives, so there was little reason to say much about them (until the Talmud, which has rulings about a lot of uncommon situations, such as the appropriate treatment of many minority groups – but dates to after Christianity's split from Judaism and isn't really regarded by Christians).
This specific example wasn't my point. The Catholic Church is one of the few organisations in reissbaker's comment that's been around long enough to have taken a strong stance on two of the topics mentioned in the comment. (And I don't know enough about their take on slavery to neatly categorise it as small-c conservatism or capital-C Conservatism: from what little I know, it seems more like Realpolitik.)
> Apply principle of charity
That is me being charitable. There are harsher ways to apply "the purpose of a system is what it does", here.
>> Apply principle of charity
> That is me being charitable. There are harsher ways to apply "the purpose of a system is what it does", here.
And they would be right. And I say that as someone who’s hard anti-woke.
yes for sure. I make sure to teach that to my kids and model that behavior. Lot of my peers are doing that too. I like the 'differently abled' terminology and mindset so much better.
When i was growing up the prevailing mindset among parents was that their kids will trampled on if they teach them to show kindness. Now we want our kids to be kind.
I’m 41 and have noticed the exact opposite movement in my lifetime. Today, we celebrate the meanest people in society (we even elect them President). Kindness is considered a flaw and means you aren’t taking advantage of every opportunity to move yourself forward.
If I compare the rhetoric of Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, it doesn’t tell me that we are more kind as a society.
For example as a gay dude, people still hate gay guys (lesbians are far more accepted). But they're just much more quiet about it now, and even if they don't hate us we still "gross" many people out, which affects their decisions due to perception of us.
And I'm not sure lesbians are "far more accepted", perhaps as long as they fit a traditional heterosexual idea of beauty and femininity and associated behaviour.
That's an odd thing to bring up randomly.
"Straight cunts"?
I noticed in Ireland (at least) the word "cunt" is used to describe an unpleasant/objectionable person in general (regardless of gender) whereas in the US it's a derogatory term for a woman.
In one corner of the matrix is a heterosexual woman and in the other corner is an ill tempered gay man.
Because even straight women prefer lesbians (just conjecture from me, though. I doubt anyone would bother running a study on it).
The latest is that the Trump admin wants to institutionalize the homeless and "people with mental disabilities".
Perhaps the range of acceptable weirdness has broadened, I'm not sure, but it's discouraging to hear their stories of just how mean kids can be.
Being happy doesn’t mean you ok. They require extensive care throughout their lives
And Facebook is already, with no ironic self-awareness, showing me ads for both.
Where do traits that aren't genetic come from then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetic_theories_of_homosex...
... Whether society is mature enough to recognize that in the presence of that treatment, Down's people will still be born and they have every bit the same dignity-of-human-life as the rest of us is a very important question.
Tiny nit, in the US it’s “Down syndrome”, not “Down’s”. Apparently we name conditions with a possessive if named for someone with it (“Lou Gehrig’s”) and without the possessive if named for, say, the person who first described the condition in a medical journal.
> Auto-eponyms may use either the possessive or non-possessive form, with the preference to use the non-possessive form for a disease named for a physician or health care professional who first described it and the possessive form in cases of a disease named for a patient (commonly, but not always, the first patient) in whom the particular disease was identified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_diseases#Aut...
This is sourced by a link to the American Association of Medical Transcriptionists, which is not a body I’d heard of but I guess have some skin in the game when it comes to the intersection of medicine and grammar. https://www.mtstars.com/word-For-eponyms-AAMT-advocates-drop...
Most of they bring to the world is random rage, unspeakable fluids, and unpleasant interactions.
But I guess driving past safari style is fine.
Can you point to any that you have read?
- Parents: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3353148/pdf/nihms37...
- People who have DS: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3740159/pdf/nihms37...
- Siblings of people with DS: https://doi.org/10.1002/ajmg.c.30101
Definitely no sampling bias here... And given that the vast majority of people who do prenatal screening decide not to have a child with Down Syndrome, I don't think the people who choose to have a Down Syndrome child are really representative of prospective parents as a whole.
The revealed preference is clear, particularly in places like Iceland where prenatal screening is ubiquitous. They have effectively eradicated Down Syndrome going forward.
Why on EARTH would the opinions of people who were so scared of the experience that they never tried it at all even for a minute be relevant to that perspective?
Also, people who have had negative experiences raising a child with Down Syndrome are presumably far less likely to be involved with non-profit organizations related to Down Syndrome.
a) all who have learnt about the situation before birth and chose abortion,
b) all who gave the kid away to some institution.
A N == 1 case from my life. My classmate had a Down kid at 20 - very rare, as Down is not typical in young mothers. She seems to be happy, even though she sacrificed her dream of a bigger family for him; it was so challenging having a Down kid that she didn't have any other.
But the father absconded and wants nothing to have with his disabled son.
A different N==1, a friend and coworker of mine had a son with DS at 23. He's now the oldest of six children. They're doing great, and he's a terrific big brother.
I think the studies matter because N needs to equal more than 1 to get a sense of how it goes for the people who do it.
Whereas some children might get into a mood and be ok after an hour, he does not unless his environment is changed.
He will literally scream or moan non stop for 6-8 hours (yes you read that right, and it's no exaggeration). He would do this when in environments he doesn't recognise, so imagine an airplane, imagine a restaurant, imagine a trip out...
We can't do those things anymore because of the actual judgement we get from other people (oh and I could write a post on this alone).
Then, when we return him to the car to drive home, his behaviour instantly turns to a smile and blowing raspberries.
We also can't get respite, our parents are too old, friends don't feel right babysitting, council services won't yet see him as old enough or have no availability, so it leaves us hiring privately, which is expensive, difficult and low availability.
Of course this takes its toll on our mental health, his sibling and us.
So on one hand I'm pleased it can soon be stopped for others, but on the other it makes up my son's behaviour, who I absolutely love regardless of the impact he has on us without realising, because there are times when you will see the stereotypical love and happiness when it is unexpected.
But I would not say I have greater happiness.
I've got a 13 year old daughter with DS. We don't have 6 hours of screaming but she has definitely thrown her share of hissy fits. My personal favorite was driving into my son's snooty private boy's school while she was sitting in the back without a shirt on (She was 12 at the time).
Or the time she decided to sit down in the middle of a busy street while we were trying to cross it and we ended up dragging her across the road skinning her feet and almost getting hit by a truck.
Usually she is happy and has tons of personality but it really does make things harder at times.
I should probably add my that my usual comment when anyone asks is that having a kid with DS sucks but not as badly as a lot of other disabilities.
wait.. what?
The fact that you'd be crushed at a depth of (IDK, 2km or so?) underwater doesn't make "swimming" unhealthy.
My concern with eugenics is that it's a thing which various groups of extremely narrow-minded bigots push for to promote mutually exclusive ideals, ideals which often have much the same level of biological awareness as an untrained idiot picking up a scuba kit and trying to walk from London to New York along the sea floor.
If we go slowly and carefully, if these treatments are optional and not mandatory, we might be able to build a better world without such self-righteous bigots. But this is definitely a case where we want to be slow, spreading this over multiple generations if we can, because we don't know the limits of our own ignorance.
oh boy, would we fare better with a lot of stuff if we'd consider this before releasing shit into the wild (asbestos, ptfe, plastics, AI and so on).
But I’m gay, and while there are pros and cons to it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. And I don’t think just because someone else doesn’t want to be me is a reasonable bar for eradication.
To be clear, I’m not saying the two are equivalent, just pointing out that you need a better argument than “you don’t want this for yourself or your children, right?”.
It's completely understandable to have an attachment to one's own identity, but at a certain point trying to impose that identity on one's children becomes ethically questionable. A good example is the deaf community - would it be appropriate for a deaf couple to withhold medical treatment from their child that would allow them to hear? I would argue no, but some people disagree.
It may be a corny answer, but i just would like to have them have a happy healthy life. So, i don't really mind or care if they'd be gay or not.
There’s no way in hell I’d want to select for straightness in my children. That is frankly insulting to me to even suggest.
“[A cochlear implant for my kid?] You think hearing people are better than deaf people?”
‘I’m saying it’s easier.’
“Would your life be easier if you were white?”
Having Dawn syndrome is severe impairment.
Being gay isn't an impairment. At least nowadays in US. I'm not sure you would feel the same if you were gay in Chechnja ... where supposedly gays just don't exist, and when something like gay happens the family deals with him themselves (the rule there - either the family deals with their own member, or the society will deal with the whole family). Especially if it were about your children.
No. It does hold for other cases where severe impairment is present.
>My comment makes it clear I’m not comparing the two
exactly. Because your case doesn't contain severe impairment. When such an impairment is added - like say making you a father of a gay child in Chechnja where you have to commit a "honor killing" of that child to save the rest of your family - the cases become much more comparable. I'm pretty sure that in Chechnja you'd choose DNA edit to remove gay gene from your child if you're given that choice.
The way you can wildly change the answer to this by changing the age, gender and marital status of the subgroup of straight people you ask is a lot more interesting than the answer itself is.
If Nazis hadn't practiced eugenics it wouldn't have been shuned as it is today.
There's nothing wrong with eugenics in itself, just with how it's applied.
Wow, that is certainly difficult to explain.
Now abortion has become a moral imperative in some cases...
But yes, I do actually think there is a moral imperative to abort fetuses with diseases that will extremely negatively impact the life of the person and of the people who will have to care for them.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't care for them if they happen to be born, not at all, but I don't really understand how it can be controversial otherwise.
Edit: user smeej has cited a few papers on this matter.
Considering that scope, the people for whom this could be useful are those who have very few embryos, one or more of which have trisomy-21. With a young couple, they will have many embryos and preimplantation genetic testing will reveal trisomy-21 early enough that even if they have fertility issues they can just run more rounds of IVF.
With an older couple or one with severe fertility issues, they may only have one or two embryos to work with.
This is all science-fiction, though, since a technique like this will require a lot of work (both in development and in regulation) before it can go live.
Especially much of Europe which didn't quite have the moral objections against abortion that the US does, save for a few countries who still have substantial observant Catholics such as Ireland and Poland.
Here's a story about Iceland https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-01/iceland-prenatal-test...
I do have to wonder what goes on in the minds of these people. My sister-in-law has a child with Down's syndrome and the situation basically ruined her life. She can no longer work, so they now struggle on a single income, if her husband were to leave her she would be completely screwed. To what end is that in the continuance of ethics?
I've had smart pets. I've never had children. I sometimes envision smart pets as like an X-year old child with Y-year old trait, almost as a person with a disability. If a child can't achieve independence and a life of their own, why let all parties suffer through that ordeal?
Based on the anecdotes here. 5 in support, 3 against as of now. I wasn't expecting such a spread, so I did a bit of research. The cognitive problems, though possibly quite severe are not so as frequently as I had assumed. Whereas the medical complications tend to be commonly nasty. As for independence there's a lot of advocacy material claiming so, but reading between the lines and in conjunction with reddit and quota testimony, I suspect very few qualify.
> And what makes you think they, or their families, see their existence as suffering?
I'm sorry, what? Those with Down's Syndrome are people, with all the emotions and experiences that entails. If they are supported, nurtured and loved then they'll lead correspondingly happy lives.
Heartily agree! My question was a reaction to the last line in the parent comment:
> If a child can't achieve independence and a life of their own, why let all parties suffer through that ordeal?
I’m sorry that I didn’t make that as clear as I could have.
* * *
I’ve seen the negativity on Reddit and, now, here. Some of that is based on historical reality: the standards for medical care and early intervention have dramatically improved outcomes for people with DS even just in my lifetime. It turns out that if you don’t believe a child is capable of, say, reading, then you don’t bother teaching them to read. This becomes a self-fulfilling diagnosis. And not too long ago, many kids with DS had inner ear damage from undetected ear infections, leading to hearing loss and difficulty communicating. As we learn more about what’s possible and what needs monitoring in kids with DS, long-term outcomes get better and better.
This recent (~last 20-40 years) improvement means there’s still a visible cohort of people who didn’t receive that level of care and probably are less independent. But I’d also suggest that there’s sample bias in anecdotes on Reddit. Like with product reviews: the vast majority in the middle don’t bother to post, and negative experiences get more emotional traction than positive ones.
The range of associated medical conditions is long and scary. But no individual gets all, or even many, of those conditions. And a lot of the scariest/most complicated stuff is correctable early post-natal (heart surgeries are common) or end of life (early appearance of dementia is unfortunately still the likely outcome for most people with DS). Medicine continues to make progress, and I think outcomes will continue to dramatically improve.
As for suffering... their families DON'T care for them. That's why I'm paid to do it for them. People avoid what causes them suffering, so the absence of voluntary caretakers is evidence enough.
Their parents (usually the mother) will end up spending all of their time to care for the kid. Other kids in the family will either be neglected or will have to help care for their disabled sibling.
When they leave home, they usually move to care facilities were multiple employees care for them.
Caring for people with Down Syndrome is a huge burden both on the individual and on society. It's something we do because we believe that everyone has a right to a fulfilled life, and because humans are generally compassionate creatures.
But if we have the choice, 95% of us chose not to have a baby with down syndrome.
That said, I'm still pro screening for Downs in fetuses. What I'm trying to say is that I'd do the screening for me as the parent. Not for the person to be born.
edit: I mean to imply here that the overton window is shifted, basically.
I'm not suggesting that every country should have genetic purity tests and policies on the level of Israel, just that we should understand that policies affect what kinds of people are more likely to be produced.
People with down syndrome are great people who live rich lives. But along with developmental disabilities they suffer from a great many health problems and have severely shortened life spans. Perhaps the future is such therapies will be able to initially focus on these secondary effects.
I don't think methods of preventing chromosomal anomalies are eugenics, since such anomalies are already not inheritable.
If the mother carries the translocation, the rate of recurrence isn’t much more than 10%. If it’s the father, it’s significantly less.
Here you moved from defect to disabled. I don't have to personally say that a group are/aren't disabled, to yet again point out your argument rests on an assumed definition otherwise yet another form of word loading. This is a really basic critical thinking skills example independent of the topic.
Aborting a fetus with trisomia so that the couple can try again for a healthy child is nothing like that.
The way people with trisomia function in society is also a product of our nurturing culture. It's only recently, when such people started living longer lives thanks to advances in medical science, that their intellectual development gained more attention and it was revealed that they can actually be more independent than commonly believed.
That being said it all requires a huge amount of effort and if a person with trisomia has siblings, they're very likely to be deprived of attention. Additionally, if they're a first child, they're the only one due to this. That is what makes it a net negative.
Are you saying people don't have more kids after having a first kid with Trisomy 21?
There isn’t a set of magic words people use (eugenics, isms/phobias) where the person accused of said word must prove that’s not the case before he can continue. “It’s eugenics” isn’t a reason to shut someone down.
And how about sleeping people? I mean they're unaware of their surroundings. Are sleeping people real people? Sure, they'll inevitably wake up in a few hours, if nothing goes wrong. Same as how a fetus will inevitably develop into an adult and be fully conscious, if nothing goes wrong.
Unless it dies in pain and suffering hours, days, months or a few years after birth due to a defect that we already know can never be cured or fixed by other means. Somehow societies that are least interested or capable in providing any aid to these traumatized families revel the most in their suffering.
There's no scientific evidence for what you're saying.
(I observe people struggling to care for elderly parents while also trying to be highly-successful rugged individuals and I'm struck by hoe, for want of a better phrase, anti-human that self-made goal is. Real people need help. In all stages of their lives. We have convinced ourselves that need is weakness).
I can say with absolute sincerity that if I happen to conceive a child with DS, I will feel like I won the genetic lottery. Not saying you do or should have the same values, but dismissing the experience of the families who do have these children in them because you have a different set of values that would make it undesirable for you isn't fair either.
We knew with (well beyond) reasonable certainty that our son would have Down syndrome and chose to continue the pregnancy. We’re not religious and not part of any pro-birth political cohort; it was absolutely an affirmative choice.
I’d imagine some downs patients have more or less functionality and independence, but seems pretty much the whole distribution is just too low for them to be independent.
If y’all are happy, it’s not really my place to comment on that. But this is one of the things that makes me nervous about having kids in future.
The issue isn’t that like all kids they come with emotional complications and caregiving. The issue is I saw these neighbors spend literally two decades trapped in Groundhog Day. They never progressed past it. Well into retirement and they were stuck in this. I’m not sure if they’ve passed now or where she is, but if they’re still alive, I’d guess they’re still in Groundhog Day. Same thing forever.
Years ago, my uncle worked in a home with a group of people with these sorts of conditions. Many were downs and needed help but families would or couldn’t provide it. It’s not just needing more attention, you have to change the way you live. Like one day, two other guys were taking them on a trip somewhere. On the way back they stop for gas, one guys filling up, the other runs in and grabs a slurpee. One of the downs guys says he wants a slurpee (he’s not supposed to have them for whatever reason.) no, can’t have that. But he wants a slurpee. Repeat ad infinitum. Winds up they’re a block away driving and this guy tries to jump out of the car to run back and get a slurpee. Uncle explained to slurpee guy later you literally can’t get anything without giving it to everyone. It’s like kindergarten logic. You have to live that way. Every day, forever.
Also: did they tell you they were miserable or felt stuck in Groundhog Day? If not, then it’s not a safe assumption. AFAIK many caretakers and family members report satisfaction with their lives despite the added complications. (Maybe your neighbors really were miserable, and if so, just know it’s not the norm anymore.)
The early genetic testing for Down syndrome is pretty accurate now. If it’s still a major worry for you about having kids, get the testing done early enough to terminate. I strongly hope that no one terminates out of ignorance about the realities - both positive and negative - of Down syndrome, but have no problem at all with informed choices.
People with Down syndrome aren’t “downs” or “downs patients”, though. It’s easy to dismiss this as language policing or, as another thread hinted at, performative. But the words we use and how we view the world are part of a feedback loop on each other. Synecdoche-izing people as merely a medical diagnosis colors whether society treats them as full members or not. And unlike, say, the Deaf or autism communities, it’s not currently a subculture or something that many people with Down syndrome identify as.
As an internet stranger, I’m asking folks to consider using “person with DS” instead of “DS patient/person/etc”.
Let me put it another way by making it less personal to tech: Hollywood celebrities, wildly successful people that basically everyone knows their names and faces, are still workers. Million dollar contracts BUT only if they play ball with the system and don't get themselves blacklisted for being too political or being too inconvenient saying no too many times to staring in soulless Disney slop, or whatever. They can retire early on that kind of money, get to a kind of stable non-participant status, sure, they can place pressure on their industry and on society to change to some degree, but they'll never call the shots because they don't write the checks.
The way I think about it; 10-20% of known pregnancies (and a larger number of all pregnancies) end in miscarriage, the majority of which are due to genetic errors and chromosomal abnormalities that, unfortunately, mean the fetus wasn't viable to begin with.
While some genetic defects don't kill the baby in the womb, the resulting baby is not healthy and will never be self-sufficient. Terminating these pregnancies lets the couple try again and gives the chance for another, healthy baby to come into the world, and possibly more because they won't have the burden of a many-orders-of-magnitude more difficult and perpetually child to raise.
I'm not arguing whether you should or shouldn't agree with them, nor saying anything about in which cases. It's just one of the primary things going on in the minds of those people, and you said you wondered.
Also you are being very dismissive by hand-waving away lifestyle. Quality of life is a significant factor in medical decisions. Many people choose short high-qol lives over longer low-qol lives.
You are defending the case that personhood begins at conception, and your argument supporting this case is "It's a unique living organism. A life. Different from a skin cell which isn't a unique organism."
If I get a kidney from someone else, and that person dies, according to your own argument, that kidney is a person. These cells are metabolizing and dividing, therefore alive, and they are unique with respect to the rest of my body.
Perhaps you'll argue that the kidney isn't an organism because it has no means of reproducing itself. To that I have two counterarguments:
- The argument implies that infertile humans are not persons.
- Nature contains every horror imaginable, including clonally transmissible cancers [0]. If my body develops such a cancer and it jumps to someone else, then I die, according to your definition my cancer that's colonizing someone else's body is a person.
I won't claim to know what defines personhood, but an obvious prerequisite (in the context of human life) is the existence of a centralized nervous system. If I am beheaded, and my headless body is placed on life support while my brain is destroyed, I, as a person, am dead, even if my body is alive. If my brain is surgically removed and placed on life support in a vat, and allowed to interface with the world somehow, then I, as a person, am still alive (whether such a life is worth living is a different question).
Accepting this prerequisite resolves the chimera problem, the kidney problem, the infertility problem and the transmissible cancer, and it results in the conclusion that a zygote is not yet a person, as it does not have a nervous system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
If we were to survey those biologists, what would they say? Same regarding an infertile person, and cancer. I think scientists have already resolved the questions you're posing.
BTW, I don't think the nervous system argument is very common. Pro life people won't use it, because it means early abortions would be ok. Most pro choice people won't use it, because it means abortions would have to be very restricted. The nervous system starts to form at 3 weeks of fetal age (5 weeks gestational age). Most people are in a tail-wagging-the-dog situation where their beliefs about personhood are derived from their belief about whether abortion should be legal or not, instead of the other way around. I see you haven't fallen into that trap. It does seem possible I have fallen into the trap. However, I do think science is on my side.
If a definition exists that avoids all these edge cases, please provide it. I am not aware of a definition of "organism" that would resolve all the problems in your stance.
> Most pro choice people won't use it, because it means abortions would have to be very restricted.
The most common pro-choice argument is based on bodily autonomy, for which the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant. It suffices to observe that there is no other situation where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy, so even if the fetus is a person, the state cannot force you to carry them to term.
So you are technically correct in stating that it is rarely used as a defense for the pro-choice position, but not "because it means abortions would have to be very restricted". In the bodily autonomy argument, the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant.
I agree with the bodily autonomy argument and the broader pro-choice position, but in this case I'm not really making a political argument, but a philosophical one, which is: it's a mistake to strongly identify personhood with the property of "being an organism" / "being alive".
One way to define a human is any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity.
> It suffices to observe that there is no other situation where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy
The draft. And a lot of other military rules.
Another example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_captain_goes_down_with_the... . The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.
>In the bodily autonomy argument, the personhood of the fetus is irrelevant.
I don't think that's right. Let's say there are 2 people: A and B. Both are innocent. Person A has some bodily suffering. The only way to solve it is to kill person B. So the options are to restore person A to full bodily health and completely destroy person B's bodily health (violating person B's bodily autonomy completely) or to leave the situation as-is, where person A has has only partial bodily health but person B has full bodily health (violating person A's bodily autonomy partially). I think the correct option is to leave the situation as-is, because that violates bodily autonomy the least.
Of course even better is for other people to give aid to person A to reduce the suffering as much as possible without hurting person B.
A few posts back you complained about "tail-wagging-the-dog" thinking, where one reasons backwards from the conclusions one wishes to reach. Your definition is obviously a product of that style of thinking: instead of clarifying what is or isn't a human, you will use the natural elasticity of terms like "problem" and "entity" to draw your boundary however you wish, based on pre-existing notions, when confronted with a challenge.
For example, if a child dies from starvation, therefore not growing into adulthood, you will of course say that the lack of nutrients is a problem that prevented this child from reaching adulthood, so it's still a human.
But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.
Or imagine a child that is born with a mutation that prevents it from reaching adulthood. Clearly we both want to consider this child human. But I would argue that no problem ever "happened" to this entity: the mutation is part of what defines the entity, there is no alternative hypothetical future where it could reach adulthood. According to your definition I could not call this child a human.
> The draft. And a lot of other military rules.
The draft is an example of the state overruling an individual's bodily autonomy, but I specifically said "[...] where the law prioritizes one's duty to care for another over one's bodily autonomy". The draft is not an example of that: it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.
> The captain has a duty to save passengers first before saving self.
Yes, you can enter an agreement with another party where you make a legally binding promise to perform some duty that overrides your bodily autonomy. This is not an example of the law overriding your bodily autonomy, it's an example of how you can use the law to relinquish your own right to bodily autonomy. Getting pregnant does not require such a legally binding promise.
> I don't think that's right [...]
I'm irrefutably correct that the bodily autonomy argument does not depend on the fetus being a person or not. It's a sufficiently prominent argument that it has a section on the "abortion debate" page on wikipedia [0]. Perhaps the argument does not convince you, but that was not my point. I only wished to show that you are mistaken about the pro-choice position being dependent on the non-personhood of the fetus.
At present I'm not interested in starting a parallel discussion about the validity of the bodily autonomy argument. I can leave a video link [1] if you're interested in how it responds to the most obvious challenges, but I will not return to it unless, maybe, the personhood thread is resolved (to avoid a branching tree discussion).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_debate#Bodily_rights
I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.
>it is a case where the law prioritizes protecting the interests/preservation of the state over another's bodily autonomy, which might in some cases coincide with caring for others, but it clearly doesn't have to.
What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state. My response is (1) mandating citizens protect the state is protecting the people in the state, and (2) if there was some hypothetical case where citizens protecting the state didn't protect the people in the state, I don't see how it would be morally ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.
The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.
But this boundary just doesn't work very well. To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented: the only way the child reaches adulthood is if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.
And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.
I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).
At this point, you can start overfitting your definition to draw an absurdly jagged boundary exactly around these counterexamples, but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.
> What you're saying seems to be that it's ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the state, but not ok for the state to mandate citizens protect the people in the state.
That is very much not what I am saying, but I wasn't very explicit about the point I was making, so I shall clarify.
Two people can disagree about what they think the law should say, but one thing that all decent people would agree on, is that the law should be consistent. We want it to apply evenly to all, without strange exceptions. We don't want any laws that say "everyone is free, except people born in May, they have to do slave labor in the mines."
I was not making an argument about what the law should be, I was arguing that abortion laws make the law inconsistent, as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another. For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.
My point was that it's inconsistent to say that the state can violate one person's bodily autonomy to keep another alive specifically in the case of pregnancy. If you want to make this consistent, you need to allow the state to do this in all cases, implying among other things forced blood transfusions and forced kidney donations. Perhaps you agree that the state should be able to force people to donate blood or a kidney, and in that case your opinion is consistent.
I wasn't expressing agreement or disagreement with the draft. I was stating that it is irrelevant as a counterexample. That's because the justification for the draft rests on a moral principle that's distinct from the one that justifies abortion laws (ie "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to defend the state" vs "citizens' bodily autonomy can be violated to save any individual's life"). Again, I deliberately offer no opinion on whether the draft is justified; for my purposes it's enough to show that it is not relevant as a counterexample.
I'm not making up this boundary. This is the scientific definition of an organism.
>To begin with you ignored the "child with deadly mutation" challenge I presented:
The deadly mutation would be the "problem [that] has happened or will happen to the entity." So it doesn't contradict my previous definition. Regardless of whether the deadly mutation could be fixed by gene modification or not, the child is still a person.
>if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.
I don't think I said that.
>And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.
I'm not sure either of those contradict my previous definition. The chimerism can be considered a problem that will happen. Regarding identical twins, we could argue whether "grow into an adult human" covers "grow into 2 adult humans" or not.
We can modify the definition slightly to avoid these ambiguities: "Any living entity that is either an adult human, or will/would grow into an adult human as long as no problem has happened or will happen to the entity and the typical development process proceeds."
>I'm not sure even adult humans would qualify for being human in your worldview, come to think of it. Some people have had their brain halves separated during their lifetime, and this seems to lead to two separate persons locked in one body, at least in some cases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain).
I'm not sure how that situation in any way would lead to a strange interaction with my definition (old or new definitions). My definition would classify that person as a person.
>but at that point I'd appreciate if you just admit that personhood starting at fertilization is just an axiom for you and everything else follows from it.
The axiom for me is that there's no such thing as a partial person. From that axiom, the only logical conclusion I can see is that personhood begins at fertilization.
>as there is no other case where the state violates the bodily autonomy of one person to force them to care for another.
What about child neglect laws? Those restrict the parents' autonomy.
>For example, if we are in a remote area and I get badly injured, and you are the only person with a compatible blood type nearby, the state can't force you to donate your blood to me.
Generally the state's laws forbid one person from taking actions that would violate the rights of another person. For example, if I'm dying and need a kidney, it's not legal for me to forcefully take a kidney from someone else, even if that's the only way to preserve my bodily rights (avoiding death).
I think that is consistent to the state making it not legal for a mother to kill a fetus (assuming the state views the fetus as a person), even if that's the only way for the mother to preserve her bodily rights.
To begin with, you did not volunteer a definition for the term "organism"; you limited yourself to attempting defining "human". This was rhetorically a good move, because defining the term "organism" is significantly harder.
You keep repeating that your definition is scientific, but offer no evidence of this. I argue that no such definition exists. The wikipedia page for the term "organism" starts as follows:
> An organism is any living thing that functions as an individual. Such a definition raises more problems than it solves, not least because the concept of an individual is also difficult. Several criteria, few of which are widely accepted, have been proposed to define what constitutes an organism.
> > if we modify its genes, which you seem to imply makes it a different entity.
> I don't think I said that.
> >And if we dig a bit deeper, the criterion by which you disqualify the unfertilized egg from being considered human also disqualifies the fertilized egg. It too is an entity which can meld with other entities to form a single entity (chimerism, as we discussed), and it can even do the opposite: identical twins start as one zygote that splits at a later point in its development.
> I'm not sure either of those contradict my previous definition. The chimerism can be considered a problem that will happen. Regarding identical twins, we could argue whether "grow into an adult human" covers "grow into 2 adult humans" or not.
You forget that my statement was a reply to something you said after you stated your definition. You argued that an unfertilized egg cannot be considered a person because it is "clearly" a different entity from the fertilized egg. That does not follow from your definition, because you don't define the term "entity" anywhere.
All my counterexamples were further attempts to divine what you mean by "entity" (which is an absolutely load-bearing concept in your definition which, again, you leave undefined). If you object to the unfertilized egg being the same entity as the fertilized egg, my hypotheses about your understanding of "entity" are that either changing the genome means that it becomes a different entity (generating the deadly mutation challenge), or merging two entities makes them a distinct entity from either original (generating the chimerism example).
My reasoning was a bit loose regarding the identical twins and split-brain examples: I implicitly generalized your potential objection to mergers to an objection to changes in cardinality. I personally don't see why one would reject mergers but accept splits, but that's not an inconsistent position.
At the moment I still don't know why you believe the unfertilized egg is necessarily a different entity from the zygote. Your response to the chimerism example provides no clarification on this: I was clearly challenging your notion of entity, but you responded only with that it "can be considered a problem that can happen".
> The axiom for me is that there's no such thing as a partial person. From that axiom, the only logical conclusion I can see is that personhood begins at fertilization.
I strongly disagree with this axiom. At some point in the distant past, our ancestors were non-human (and, possibly but not necessarily at the same time, not persons). The logical conclusion from your axiom is that there was, at some point, a hard boundary where an entirely nonperson animal gave birth to a "full person" human (and that first human then presumably had to reproduce through bestiality, unless through some amazing fortune another full 100% human being was born and fertile during their fertile years).
This seems to me a significantly less reasonable reading of reality than describing this as a gradual process towards personhood/humanity, where each successive generation is "more personlike". I find this also a more moral reading of reality: to me clearly an ape or an octopus is more personlike than a cockroach, which is in turn a bit more personlike than a jellyfish, which is a tiny tiny bit more personlike than a sea sponge.
> What about child neglect laws? Those restrict the parents' autonomy.
Correct. But it does not restrict their bodily autonomy. I don't think parents can be forced to donate blood or organs to their offspring. Of course most would without a second thought, but not because it is obligated by law.
> Generally the state's laws forbid one person from taking actions that would violate the rights of another person [...] I think that is consistent to the state making it not legal for a mother to kill a fetus [...]
There's a contrived "standard thought experiment" that responds to this: suppose A kidnaps B, ties them down, and connects B's bloodstream to an entirely innocent C with kidney failure, so that B's kidneys process C's blood. Disconnecting B from C will result in the death of C (assume there is no way around this). In this case the status quo is that B is keeping C alive, and it requires active intervention to change this situation. Does B now have a moral duty to remain physically connected to C at all times? Does B "kill" C if they disconnect the bloodstreams?
If you believe that it is, your opinion is consistent. If it's not, then you must at least permit abortion in the case of rape, even if the fetus is a person.
That's a good point. However, none of the examples of situations where the definition is debatable apply to humans. The page lists viruses, colonial organisms, zooids, and collaboration organisms. I think for humans (which I think is the most widely studied organism), scientists can clearly define what is an organism and what isn't.
I think if you were to survey biologists, the vast majority (95%+) would agree with me on all the cases ("is this specific thing a human organism") you listed.
>"entity" (which is an absolutely load-bearing concept in your definition which, again, you leave undefined)
Ok. Let's define it as "a cell or group of cells that are joined together and acting together".
>You argued that an unfertilized egg cannot be considered a person because it is "clearly" a different entity from the fertilized egg.
I said "I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA."
My point was that there's a clear difference between receiving nutrition and 2 entities with half a set of DNA coming together. My point wasn't that the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are clearly different entities (as you've pointed out, that's not exactly clear, and depends on the definition entity).
My definition doesn't hinge on the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg being different entities. An unfertilized egg won't typically grow into an adult human. A fertilized egg will typically grow into an adult human.
>At some point in the distant past, our ancestors were non-human (and, possibly but not necessarily at the same time, not persons). The logical conclusion from your axiom is that there was, at some point, a hard boundary where an entirely nonperson animal gave birth to a "full person" human (and that first human then presumably had to reproduce through bestiality, unless through some amazing fortune another full 100% human being was born and fertile during their fertile years).
That's a good point. One thing though is that our actions today can't impact people in the past. So from an ethics point of view, we don't need to worry about the past, only the present and future. And as you say, we don't 100% know what happened in the past.
With the partial people view, someone might conclude today a person with a certain genetic disorder is similar to an ape, and thus a partial person, and thus doesn't need rights. By saying "no partial people today", we avoid that problem.
>If you believe that it is, your opinion is consistent. If it's not, then you must at least permit abortion in the case of rape, even if the fetus is a person.
I would say the way to resolve this is by defining what is the standard care that each person deserves.
If someone needs an exotic treatment that costs $1B/day to survive each day, and a hospital has the treatment in stock, is the hospital obligated to provide it to someone who can't pay? I would say no. It's within the hospital's rights to not give the person the treatment, or cease treatment if already provided in previous days.
However, is it within the hospital's rights to cease providing the person food and water against the person's will? (Let's avoid the euthanasia discussion and say the person is fully responsive but is quadriplegic.) I would say no. Food and water are standard care, and cannot be denied.
Food and water are standard care. The $1B treatment isn't.
2 people being attached permanently for the purpose of blood processing of a failed kidney isn't standard care.
A mother's womb is standard care for a fetus.
(Another thing to consider is what direct action is taken. In a D&E abortion, the fetus is cut into pieces with a scissors, which is the cause of death. So in the specific case of a D&E abortion, there's a second clear difference from the blood treatment case, in that it's a direct physical attack on the fetus that kills the fetus. E.g. in the kidney failure case, would it be ok to cut the person into pieces with a chainsaw? No, even if the person already is going to die of kidney failure. Other types of abortion are not as direct though, so this argument can't be as clearly used to condemn all types of abortion.)
> That's a good point. One thing though is that our actions today can't impact people in the past. So from an ethics point of view, we don't need to worry about the past, only the present and future. And as you say, we don't 100% know what happened in the past.
> With the partial people view, someone might conclude today a person with a certain genetic disorder is similar to an ape, and thus a partial person, and thus doesn't need rights. By saying "no partial people today", we avoid that problem.
Here it's important to remember exactly what positions we are defending. The viewpoint you have been defending is not merely that we should, for ethical reasons, consider the zygote to be a person. You are defending a much stronger claim, which is that denying that the zygote is a person goes against our current scientific understanding.
To be absolutely clear: I don't think that your belief that the zygote is a person is unscientific or demonstrably wrong (although I believe there are more sensible candidates for boundaries). What's more is that I understand the need for a "legal fiction" around personhood: a legal definition that is deliberately too broad, stemming from a hopefully broadly shared sense that we should try very hard to avoid false negatives.
However, I am very certain that this conviction is not a scientific necessity. It's specifically this part of your claim I am addressing with the "nonhuman ancestors" example. My claim is that science simply does not provide us with a clean boundary between persons and non-persons. Whatever boundary we are going to come up with for legal and moral reasons is going to be somewhat arbitrary, probably based on drawing the boundary a bit too broad.
You claim that your belief that the zygote is a person follows logically from the axiom that personhood is always non-partial. I agree with this as a legal fiction. But from a philosophical or scientific point of view, this is simply disprovable. If you accept that my nonhuman ancestors example disproves your axiom of non-partiality of personhood in the domain of philosphy/science (not in the domain of law), then:
- you can continue to believe that we should consider the zygote as a full person
- but, your argument that it is logically or scientifically necessary to consider the zygote as a person collapses.
> 2 people being attached permanently for the purpose of blood processing of a failed kidney isn't standard care.
I feel like your entire argument here rests on the idea that the attachment is permanent, making your sacrifice much greater than that of a pregnant woman. If we contrive a reason why, for example, you would only need to be attached for a month or week or so, this argument evaporates. If you need to provide your kidneys for the duration of one week, then your sacrifice is clearly much less than that of a pregnant woman. On what basis can the state then force a pregnant woman to stay pregnant for nine months, but not force you to remain a living dialysis machine for a week?
> My definition doesn't hinge on the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg being different entities. An unfertilized egg won't typically grow into an adult human. A fertilized egg will typically grow into an adult human.
Retracing this thread in the conversation, I'm getting confused about what your exact position here is. This is what I said earlier:
> Me: But if an unfertilized egg dies due to not being fertilized, I'm sure you would argue that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem; or alternatively, that the fertilized egg is a different entity from the unfertilized egg. But none of this follows naturally from the definition, it requires our notions of "problem" and "entity" to be perfectly aligned to begin with. And you will pick your understanding of "problem" and "entity" based on wanting to prove that the unfertilized egg isn't a human but the starving child is.
So you must either claim that it's a different entity, or that not being fertilized doesn't count as a "problem". The thread continues:
> You: I think there's a clear biological difference between an entity receiving nutrition, and 2 entities, each with half of a set of DNA, coming together to make a single entity with a full set of DNA.
> Me: The difference is "clear" to you because you are reasoning backwards from a desired conclusion. You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you.
> You: I'm not making up this boundary. This is the scientific definition of an organism.
Because of this quote, I was convinced that out of the "problem" and "entity" objections, you picked the "entity" one; that is, you respond to my challenge that the unfertilized egg can be considered a human being in your definition by stating that it is a different entity from the unfertilized egg, not that "not being fertilized" doesn't count as a problem.
But then in your most recent post you state "My point wasn't that the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are clearly different entities". Then what was the point you were making by bringing up the definition of an organism?
>However, I am very certain that this conviction is not a scientific necessity.
Well personhood isn't a scientific concept. So science can't prove when personhood begins. It can only provide evidence about development that we can use to try to determine when personhood begins.
>If you accept that my nonhuman ancestors example disproves your axiom of non-partiality of personhood in the domain of philosphy/science
It doesn't 100% disprove it, because we don't 100% know what happened in the past.
>If you need to provide your kidneys for the duration of one week, then your sacrifice is clearly much less than that of a pregnant woman.
Well if I'm tied down by a tube, would I be able to walk around, drive a car, sleep, use the restroom, have a private conversation? A pregnant woman can do all those things. Yes, while in labor her activities are more restricted, but that doesn't last a week.
If the level of inconvenience of the tube was similar to the level of inconvenience of pregnancy, I would be in favor of the state making it illegal to disconnect the tube IF it's the only way to prevent an innocent person from dying. The state should however compensate the healthy person. I'm also in favor of the state providing compensation for pregnant women.
>So you must either claim that it's a different entity, or that not being fertilized doesn't count as a "problem".
The "or" in that sentence is inclusive or, right, not exclusive or? So it's ok for me to claim both, or just 1?
I claim that not being fertilized doesn't count as a problem. Most eggs don't get fertilized. The standard course of events for an egg is no fertilization.
I also think the unfertilized egg and fertilized egg are different entities. But due to the "or", I don't need to argue this point. For the sake of an argument we could say they're the same entity, and my overall point would still stand.
>Then what was the point you were making by bringing up the definition of an organism?
You said "You want to claim that the zygote is a person and the unfertilized egg is not, so of course the merger of DNA is the "clear" boundary between entities to you." I do think that's the clear boundary between entities, and I replied why. However, my overall definition is valid regardless of whether they're the same entity or different entities.
World is full of human life. West (and not only) manufactures failed wars that killed millions of civilians without a blink of an eye (Vietnam, Iraqs, Afghanistan just to name a few) and sends its own people to death. Where are those life-at-all-costs defenders?
Such people are the last to force their own viewpoints on protecting life unto literally everybody else. Yet they feel the most righteous due to whatever fucked up morals they have to spread them and attack everybody who dares to think differently.
Another story - very similar people (to the point of calling them often the same) have huge mental barriers unplugging their relatives from life support, in situations when there is 0 chance for any sort of recovery and brain is heavily damaged. Wife is a doctor and most of them are religious freaks, ie italian where we live (nothing against you guys, apart from this). They let their closest people suffer horribly (within the limits of their state) for months or even years, put a massive financial burden on whole society just because they don't feel like signing papers for unplugging already dead person, its just some parts of their body is sort of kept alive. Absolutely deplorable weak 'humans', I have no nice word for those. Suffice to say wife saw her share of such folks during her years in hospitals and it was one of the reasons she moved to private sphere.
It's not just some definition. It's the scientific definition. Lots of people have the motto "I believe in science" but then reject the scientific definition of life when it comes to humans.
>If I develop a tumor is it also a life? It certainly behaves so.
Well, we could survey those same biologists. I think they would say no. Does it have DNA of a unique person different from the person it's in? I'm not a biologist, but I think no.
>World is full of human life. West (and not only) manufactures failed wars that killed millions of civilians without a blink of an eye (Vietnam, Iraqs, Afghanistan just to name a few) and sends its own people to death. Where are those life-at-all-costs defenders?
https://www.solidarity-party.org/
Their 2020 presidential candidate is so life-at-all-costs that his website TLD is life: https://briancarroll.life .
>Such people are the last to force their own viewpoints on protecting life unto literally everybody else. Yet they feel the most righteous due to whatever fucked up morals they have to spread them and attack everybody who dares to think differently.
I'm not really sure what you're saying here. You say these people are the last to force their viewpoints on protecting life onto other people, but also they aggressively force their viewpoint on protecting life onto other people? That seems like a contradiction to me.
Maybe this really is different from all the things about which we've later lamented, "Never again!" but we certainly ought not consider that criterion easily satisfied.
Just because something isn't ethnic cleansing or genocide doesn't mean "never again" doesn't apply.
>fully developed humans
What's the definition of fully developed? Are physically and mentally disabled people fully developed? There have been large scale killings targeting them in particular. Are babies fully developed? There have been large scale killings that kill them.
I think what we should care about isn’t human life, but human consciousness. A person in a vegetative state doesn’t suffer when you pull the plug. The difference matters and is unmistakable between large organisms which have gone through a long process of development and tiny ones which have not; we should reasonably presume that only one of the two is conscious given no further evidence.
The likely response is the potential argument, and I don’t care about that. I care about human suffering.
Regarding the size of the organism, and amount of time spent developing, what about a very early preemie who is unconscious but will recover?
In the second case there’s no reason at all to do something so drastic. Abortion is acceptable only because the mother’s body is being used and damaged, and she should have the right to prevent that use. The preemie doesn’t need to damage someone’s body to exist.
Edit: having read some of your other comments, I have a question for you. Why should we care about a zygote and not a sperm and an egg. Why is the act of fertilization the line between simple reproductive cells and a beautiful human life. Both have the potential to make a person, both are genetically human, both likely cannot experience things in a human-like way.
Zygote, embryo, fetus, infant, toddler, adolescent, and adult are all different stages of the life cycle of a human organism. Gametes are not. Before fertilization, there are gametes. Unless fertilization happens, no organism comes into being. But once it does, it is the same organism from then all the way until its death. This is a biological reality, not a philosophical one.
Regarding your new position: if someone's body was being used and damaged, would it be ok to kill the unconscious preemie to prevent that?
>Edit: having read some of your other comments, I have a question for you. Why should we care about a zygote and not a sperm and an egg. Why is the act of fertilization the line between simple reproductive cells and a beautiful human life. Both have the potential to make a person, both are genetically human, both likely cannot experience things in a human-like way.
A zygote is a unique human organism. It has the full DNA of a human. It will grow into an adult human unless it dies for some reason. A sperm and an egg are not human organisms. Individually they don't have the full DNA of a human. A sperm won't grow into an adult human. An egg won't grow into an adult human.
The memories thing is different. Fundamentally, you’re not causing immediate suffering if you kill someone and they never know. The problem is that you can know they likely want to continue to live and you're violating their agency. The key difference with the fetus is that it has no and never has had the ability to want.
> Regarding your new position: if someone's body was being used and damaged, would it be ok to kill the unconscious preemie to prevent that?
I hope I’ve made clear why it’s not a new position. I presume we’re talking about a fetus fairly far along in development, such that we can have doubts about its possession of consciousness. In this case it’s a matter of triage, you do the least harm you can with the tools you have. Abortion methods should be nonlethal when possible out of an abundance of caution. Beyond that, mostly defer to what the mother wants and what risks she’s willing to take.
The way that wants are experienced changes over time. The way a newborn experiences a want is different from the way a 5-year-old experiences a want. We can infer what an embryo wants by what actions the embryo is taking. The embryo is working to grow into an adult.
If we want to go by when brainwaves are detected, that's 5 weeks fetal age, 7 weeks gestational age. There are only 5 places in the world that allow abortion for some age but ban a 7-week-gestational-age abortion:
* Turkmenistan (although for economic or social reasons, it allows up to 22 weeks)
* The US states of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina
* The Mexican state of Aguascalientes
In all 5 places, it's allowed later than 7 weeks in the case of rape.
I think the fact that these states constitute big changes is exactly why people intuitively latch on to them as points at which to assign moral value to a developing human. What I’m arguing is that the logic for this falls apart on closer examination, and that the only real reason I see to argue the conception idea comes from religious authority. Yet you haven’t used religion in your arguments so far, so why is it the point for you?
> The way that wants are experienced changes over time. The way a newborn experiences a want is different from the way a 5-year-old experiences a want. We can infer what an embryo wants by what actions the embryo is taking. The embryo is working to grow into an adult.
I absolutely understand this reasoning and I have a certain appreciation for it. The problem is, if you assign single-celled organisms the capacity to want from a perspective, yet you use the capacity to want as your bar for moral consideration, then you are more or less saying any organism of any scale should receive equal moral weight, yet seemingly arbitrarily deciding to restrict this to those with human dna. I don’t think that definition of want is useful; I think the capacity to want needs to be thought of as requiring conscious experience to make much sense here, which is also the thing I’m trying to assign value to.
> If we want to go by when brainwaves are detected, that's 5 weeks fetal age, 7 weeks gestational age.
You’re on the right track. I’m not trying to convince you of a specific cutoff, but of the logic I think should lead those developing a cutoff. I’d want experts in fetal development and brain development and so on to be the ones who decide so that risk of harm is minimized. I imagine there are studies on this; I’ve seen indications the result would be anywhere between 7-24 weeks, but I don’t know precisely when.
I value a human's life more than any other animal's life. I think that's the same for most people. Without that, we might conclude that a dog's life is more valuable than a newborn baby's life, due to development time and abilities.
> 7-24 weeks
Curtis Means was born at gestational age 21 weeks 1 day and survived. If personhood might begin at 24 weeks, does that mean that Curtis might not have been a person when born?
Well not really though, neither takes place in an instant. Both are complex processes that span some time composed of numerous simultaneous and sequential steps. I think some kind of partial personhood is more or less a given because biological processes don’t really happen in discrete steps. As for how that might make sense, a very crude example might be coming out of anesthesia or being extremely drunk. These are states where memory, sense of self, and consciousness can fade in and out independently; perhaps partial consciousness is a reasonable thing. Certainly many of the things we consider essential to our internal sense of personhood develop gradually, like our sense of self and, for that matter, our senses of the external world. We don’t initially, as infants, know the difference between our body and the world. Does this make infants not people? No, not legally or morally, but in some sense they lack aspects we’d associate with personhood.
> Curtis Means was born at gestational age 21 weeks 1 day and survived. If personhood might begin at 24 weeks, does that mean that Curtis might not have been a person when born?
My intuition is that curtis would qualify, and that 21 weeks could be too late for lethal abortion methods. At the same time, if a baby were born braindead I wouldn’t assign it personhood. Being born isn’t enough.
>We don’t initially, as infants, know the difference between our body and the world. Does this make infants not people? No, not legally or morally, but in some sense they lack aspects we’d associate with personhood.
I agree. I think this supports my view, that someone can be morally a person, even when lacking aspects we'd associate with personhood.
>I'm wary of classifying any group as partial people.
I think you need to in certain areas if you want to understand the world better is all. A braindead person isn’t the same as a non-braindead person, and there’s likely a continuum between them. My response is to suggest assigning a reasonable point between the two past which someone is a person.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding. You seem to be agreeing there's not much difference between a fetus and an infant. But you're saying that this isn't an argument against abortion, because... are you saying killing a born infant is ok?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8406655/
> In mammals, fertilization involves multiple ordered steps, including the acrosome reaction, zona pellucida penetration, sperm–egg attachment, and membrane fusion.
All development is a continuum.
When choosing the point at which personhood begins, we should look at the stages of development to identify the most likely candidate. Fertilization is the most rapid period of development. Fertilization is the point at which the organism is formed. Before fertilization, there is no entity with a full set of DNA. After fertilization, there is an entity with a full set of DNA. Before fertilization, there is no entity that will typically grow into an adult human. After fertilization, there is an entity that will typically grow into an adult human. All these factors point to fertilization being when personhood begins.
If there were abortions that take place during the process of fertilization, then we would need to look into fertilization to determine exactly when during fertilization does personhood begin. But since that's not the case, we don't currently need to examine the substeps within fertilization to determine that. It's sufficient to say personhood begins some time during fertilization.
The problem for me is when people make very fundamental moral claims about what I think they see as the nature of reality off the basis of these very important, but arbitrary in relation to some fixed universal morality, heuristics of perception. The idea that we are each only one thing, singular and indivisible, has historically been a very enticing idea, but I feel that science and philosophy for the last maybe hundred years have also been realizing and grappling with the idea that we’re more group organisms, that what makes us us isn’t the material that constitutes our bodies but the dynamics of our separate parts, the same way a society is found in the dynamics of relations between people more than the people themselves. This makes it hard for me to accept the idea that any stage of development could constitute a step change, not just from our arbitrary perspectives, but in the grand scheme of things (which is what matters morally). The dynamics between sperm and egg, when placed in close proximity, constitute a set of real forces acting in the world to bring about a person. The fact that two becomes one seems irrelevant to me; both the sperm-egg system or the zygote system of dynamic, interplaying forces may eventually bring a person about. The one undeniable fact that to me could make a person a person is sentience; conscious awareness, because in observing the fact of our own conscious experience we avoid making our determination on the basis of something arbitrary. To the experiencing person, there’s absolutely no doubt they’re experiencing. I think when we make our moral codes we should be doing so not to protect particular assemblies of matter or dynamic interplays of forces, but to make our best effort at bettering and protecting the desired continuity of subjective, conscious experience. It seems like the only rational thing for us to do.
We don’t know exactly when or why all the stuff of a human body leads to a conscious experience, but we do know certain things it’s correlated against, e.g. people without brains seem not to demonstrate conscious awareness. Absent more information, I think the best thing that we can do to protect and better conscious experiences in general is to select an intelligible point in development where we think all the “machinery” for consciousness is present in the fetus and draw the line on abortion there. If I’m correct, we avoid harming what I think matters as much as we really can.
> Before fertilization, there is no entity with a full set of DNA. After fertilization, there is an entity with a full set of DNA. Before fertilization, there is no entity that will typically grow into an adult human. After fertilization, there is an entity that will typically grow into an adult human.
I hope you can see what my response would be already. A full set of DNA isn’t morally significant in my opinion, nor is there a meaningful difference between an entity, here defined more as physical body, which will grow into an adult human and a collection of physical bodies which will do the same. If in some weird universe (Asimov story) our life cycle had us develop as three independent beings which merged together at a later age, my answer would be exactly the same. If the independent beings or something about their interaction can be reasonably thought to lead to conscious experience, then they’re worth the ethical consideration we give to people.
So now there are 2 factors: continuation of consciousness and humanity. Is it possible 1 factor is more important than the other? There are several things that to me weaken the strength of the continuation of consciousness factor:
* It's continuation of consciousness instead of consciousness. Consciousness is somewhat intuitive. Continuation of consciousness is less so. Since it's a level removed from what's intuitive, that weakens the factor for me.
* Consciousness throughout life takes many forms. A newborn, an adult, someone with dementia, people with various other types of mental illnesses. It makes it hard to define consciousness.
* The fact that continuation of consciousness cannot stand by itself, it needs the other factor: humanity.
These 3 reasons make me think that humanity is more important than continuation of consciousness. In fact, I think humanity is so important that continuation of consciousness isn't essential. I think a human life is valuable even if consciousness hasn't developed yet.
> If in some weird universe (Asimov story) our life cycle had us develop as three independent beings which merged together at a later age, my answer would be exactly the same.
I'm not familiar with the story, but I think that's quite a different scenario. Those 3 beings each have value on their own, not because they might later merge into another being. Whereas a sperm and an egg have no value on their own.
The reason I dismiss the value of a sperm and an egg isn't because they can merge. If 3 adult humans could merge into 1 superhuman, I wouldn't dismiss the value of the pre-merged adult humans.
I say a zygote has value because it's a young human. It's growing into an adult human.
A sperm isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. An egg isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. A sperm and an egg that are nearby each other aren't a young human. Those 2 things aren't growing into an adult human. They might join or might not join. Or maybe some other sperm might zoom in real fast and fertilize the egg instead.
If the 3 independent beings were sitting in a room, would we call them 1 merged being? No. They're still 3 independent beings. Same with the sperm and the egg. Just because they're nearby each other doesn't make them a human life.
96% of biologists say human life beings at fertilization. Not when the sperm and egg are nearby each other.
It has to be. We need some interval of time to experience anything. Continuity also relates a lot to agency. Most people want to keep experiencing over dying.
> Consciousness throughout life takes many forms. A newborn, an adult, someone with dementia, people with various other types of mental illnesses. It makes it hard to define consciousness.
Consciousness is a very low bar honestly. Every one of the people mentioned would possess it in some form or another. You could use a different term if this one is too fuzzy.
> The fact that continuation of consciousness cannot stand by itself, it needs the other factor: humanity.
I think this is more a reflection of our current world than some perfectly ethical one. Since we’re humans, we’re always going to value our own offspring more than a dog. That’s deeply instinctual stuff. That doesn’t mean dogs aren’t richly conscious animals deserving of significant ethical consideration, but we’re not unbiased neutral observers in the matter. I’m just trying to come up with a consistent ethical approach to a narrow issue; for situations where two conscious things are being compared, you might be able to denote specific capacities, like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog, but this is all very hypothetical and I don’t think we need it for the abortion debate.
> A sperm isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. An egg isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human.
But they are? The only reason they try to fuse together at all is in service of the growth of a human.
> 96% of biologists say human life beings at fertilization. Not when the sperm and egg are nearby each other.
They’re not talking about personhood or something. They’re talking about something fundamentally classificatory, like asking “what makes a species separate from other species.” The usual answer is that they can’t breed with each other, but there are lots of kinda fuzzy exceptions and gray areas with that. To word it better, if I said “Presume the goal is to determine when, in the study of individual organisms, such organisms can be thought to come about. Tell me what stage in the development of a human comes first,” the answer would need to be around the time of fertilization because the question presumes the frame of biological study, the existence of an initial stage, etc.
> If the 3 independent beings were sitting in a room, would we call them 1 merged being? No. They're still 3 independent beings. Same with the sperm and the egg. Just because they're nearby each other doesn't make them a human life.
Right. By the same token, I don’t think a single cell constitutes a “human life”, with all the connotations that phrase carries. If it’s most appropriate to call that single cell a human life, then clearly human life isn’t the thing that determines ethical consideration. My fixation on the sperm + egg -> zygote transformation is a consequence of your belief that the left term isn’t morally significant but the right term is. I think everything that we care about is the same for both terms. Non-conscious, relatively simple mechanically compared to an adult, no nerves or brain, no awareness of the world, no hopes or dreams. The zygote lacks everything essential to personhood at this stage other than its human origin, which it shares with the sperm and egg.
What would we use? Existence of brain waves? Existence of neurons? Those both would include most animals.
>like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog
Babies cannot recognize themselves in the mirror until around 1.5 years old. Several types of animals can recognize themselves in the mirror: elephants, dolphins, primates, mice, some birds, some fish.
If we justify the value of babies by saying that they'll have certain abilities in the future, that same thing could be said about a zygote.
>> A sperm isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human. An egg isn't a young human; it isn't growing into an adult human.
>But they are? The only reason they try to fuse together at all is in service of the growth of a human.
Sure the only reason they fuse is in service of the growth of a human. However, before fusing, a sperm only has half the DNA of a human. A sperm's DNA doesn't define a human, and isn't sufficient to grow into a human, and thus cannot be called a young human. Same for an egg. A zygote has the full DNA of a human, which defines a human, and thus the zygote can grow into a human, and thus the zygote can be called a young human.
>>Just because they're nearby each other doesn't make them a human life.
>Right. By the same token, I don’t think a single cell constitutes a “human life”
That's not the same token. I was saying that 2 (or 3) things being nearby each other doesn't make them 1 entity. You're talking about whether a single entity has certain abilities or not. Those are 2 different discussions.
Relating this back to abortion, existence of brain waves is a higher bar than existence of neurons is a higher bar than fertilization. If I could convince you to care about either of those instead, then sure let’s run with that.
The question with abortion is “at what point are we concerned that killing something could be unethical.” For the criteria to include some or even most animals isn’t a terrible thing; we probably shouldn’t kill animals willy nilly.
>>like recognition of self, by which you prioritize e.g. a person over a dog
>Babies cannot recognize themselves in the mirror until around 1.5 years old. Several types of animals can recognize themselves in the mirror: elephants, dolphins, primates, mice, some birds, some fish.
>If we justify the value of babies by saying that they'll have certain abilities in the future, that same thing could be said about a zygote.
If I recall correctly, I was explicitly talking about how we might go about evaluating and comparing ethical worth beyond the developmental scale relevant to abortion, and I said this was just hypothetical. I wasn’t arguing recognition of self is relevant to abortion.
>However, before fusing, a sperm only has half the DNA of a human. A sperm's DNA doesn't define a human, and isn't sufficient to grow into a human, and thus cannot be called a young human.
I don’t consider the “completeness of DNA” philosophically relevant. The sperm-egg system, both considered together, does have a complete set of DNA. Why does the physical separation change the fundamental ethical nature of interfering with the process? If I have a sperm and egg very close to each other, about to merge, and place a barrier between them, why wouldn’t this be as ethically horrifying as immediately destroying the product of their merging?
>I was saying that 2 (or 3) things being nearby each other doesn't make them 1 entity.
Let’s agree my argument and analogy were poor. Why does entity-ness matter to ethics? When you say entity, are you referring to a physical body, or to a unified consciousness? Is a rock an entity? What about an amoeba?
Do you believe that killing a baby is morally worse than killing an innocent dog or elephant? And what is the reasoning for that belief?
Do you believe that killing an innocent adult is morally worse than killing a baby? And what is the reasoning for that belief?
I believe that killing a baby is worse than killing an innocent dog or elephant, because human life has intrinsic value significantly greater than non-human animal life.
I believe that killing an innocent adult and a baby are equally bad, because all people have equal value.
>I don’t consider the “completeness of DNA” philosophically relevant. The sperm-egg system, both considered together, does have a complete set of DNA. Why does the physical separation change the fundamental ethical nature of interfering with the process?
If they're physically separated, we don't have an entity that could be called a young human. We don't have an entity that contains a plan for how to grow into an adult.
After they've joined, we do have an entity that could be called a young human.
>If I have a sperm and egg very close to each other, about to merge, and place a barrier between them, why wouldn’t this be as ethically horrifying as immediately destroying the product of their merging?
No. In the same way that it's not horrifying if some other sperm zoomed in real fast and fertilized the egg and blocks off the first sperm. Before fertilization, there is no entity that could be called a young human.
>Why does entity-ness matter to ethics?
There's no known way a single person can be composed of 2 physical entities. So I say that when there are 2 physical entities, there isn't a single person composed of the 2 of them.
Another line of reasoning is why should there be a moral difference between a sperm and egg very close to each other and a sperm and egg miles apart? I don't see any reason. We would have to consider every possible pair of sperm and egg in the world as a person, which doesn't make sense.
>When you say entity, are you referring to a physical body, or to a unified consciousness?
Physical body. There's no known way a person can be split across 2 bodies. So a sperm and an egg can't be a person.
>Is a rock an entity? What about an amoeba?
Yes and yes.
Ethics are more complicated than a black and white definition of when a magical boundary has been achieved.
However, regarding the question of personhood, I wonder, when does it begin?
Does it begin at birth? I think not, because a fetus a few days before birth is essentially no different from a newborn in terms of development and abilities. There's quite a wide variance in how soon or late a baby can be born and survive.
Does it begin some time between fertilization and birth? I think not, because that entire time is a period of continual growth. There's no instant where the fetus is suddenly transformed. The fetus is getting older, developing. Similar to how a born baby gets older and develops. If personhood were to begin in this stage, it would have to be gradual, meaning partial personhood for some period of time. But that doesn't make sense. How can someone be a partial person?
I'm not talking about a magical boundary. I'm talking about (a) a biological boundary, and (b) the question of personhood, neither of which are magic.
The question is who is responsible for them and what it means to those or society.
Let those ethicists take care of a Down-syndrome person one year, then ask them again.
About lifestyle and such.
Ethicize can everybody. The real questions are more down to earth. Pun not intended.
By the way, my partner and I are of different views and because of her I know there are very different types, some are totally self sufficient and work.
As always, truth is somewhere in between. Do not eradicate, let people choose. There will be people who terminate, others will not. Let those people pay a share who take the risk and then put their child to social care. But be human and society should help and pay a big ahsre too.
How much? I have no idea. We would need the exact numbers, other social projects, a good discussion forum, tests before people comment. I probably have no ida about Down syndrome and still, I am just being commenting.
I think generally a big misunderstanding that there is one solution and one way. We should always just find a middle way, listening to each other, learning, voting, discussing. Keeping freedom of choice and responsibility of own choices in balance.
Isn't it only just Vegans?
No, it isn’t. “I wish you didn’t exist because your existence inconveniences me,” is a step away from “I should be able to kill you because you inconvenience me.”
You will likely think that I am being hyperbolic (“We’re just talking about if it was a good idea for these people to exist, not saying we should be able to kill them now that they do exist.”), but I suspect that you would not feel the same way if it was your existence being discussed this way.
Oh wait, no, that didn't happen, because in both your and my case it turns out humans are able to distinguish between life that is and life that might be. The "step" you mentioned is only a small one in a philosophical sense, enormous otherwise to the point of not being a concern.
They’re trying.
Plenty of states, like Alaska and Oregon, already allow abortion right up to the moment of birth. They don't happen, ever, zero times, except in cases where somebody is going to die otherwise.
The handwringing over "omg they're killing children" actually just kills both children and mothers by making lifesaving procedures illegal. People don't carry unwanted babies to term unless forced to do so.
Thus making it illegal to abort a full-term baby does nothing but score political points, at the expense of the deaths of some mothers who desperately wanted a child and then had some complications.
Socializing the costs this way has its own ethical problems, especially where the parents continue to reproduce after learning they are carriers; I’ve simply concluded that the costs of care are completely negligible when you contrast them with the loss of human dignity that results from valuing an individual human on the basis of economic cost or contribution.
Accommodating for a human that exists, if suffering, is clearly a moral obligation. Doing so when it’s not a human but a husk still is not, and deciding in favour of the very human parents—who also have a right to happiness—is definitely ethically valid.
In a related discussion, someone argued that keeping up industrial farming is just, because if we stopped doing so all the cattle that wouldn’t been born would be worse off for never being alive, even if their existence was suffering, because suffering is better than not being at all. I firmly believe this is just wrong. Before a being gains consciousness, it’s not a being and doesn’t experience, hence by avoiding their conception we also avoid unnecessary suffering.
You bring up an interesting argument, but I think there is some nuance here. I am not arguing that we have an obligation to propagate human life for the sake of propagating human life; I just think there is a risk of devaluing existing human life by claiming it ought not to have existed in the first place.
There are limitations here. e.g. if one is offended at the claim that Down Syndrome is something to be cured, it may be that one is placing too much emphasis on identifying the expression of an individual’s genes with the individual himself (so e.g. eliminating the extra chromosome is not analogous to eliminating the person himself). We wouldn’t do this with a broken bone, but the solution to a broken bone is setting the bone, whereas the “solution” to Down Syndrome has historically been abortion.
“Besides” is doing a lot of work here.
I can’t speak for the parent commenter of course, but this is by no means a universally accepted truth.
This is not inherent to Down's syndrome, this is because we live in a society that could easily support people but doesn't.
Until people like you figure that out, you're going to continue to be sorely disappointed with your political progress, because your "perspective" is not remotely logical.
Their compulsive erasure of female voices across the internet is just the same impulse of control.
Title: When They Warn of Rare Disorders, These Prenatal Tests Are Usually Wrong Authors: Sarah Kliff & Aatish Bhatia
https://web.archive.org/web/20250712195745/https://www.nytim...
A novel therapy that does not result in the termination of the pregnancy might satisfy the conservatives, but it does nothing to satisfy the disability advocates, who point out that these kinds of technologies fundamentally normalize the idea that they should never have been born the way that they are.
I have no moral problem with a therapeutic intervention that improves a life by treating a debilitating disorder with no cost of life.
I will have moral problems when those ideals are inevitably twisted and loosened over time to not just treat disorders, but pick attributes like intelligence, strength, skin color, attractiveness, etc.
One can value/respect people with DS and strive to eliminate DS at the same time.
People are still looking for a genetic link to autism.
I can see how if we, as society, - gain such immense wealth that taking care of/ providing support to/ humans with DS becomes so easy - arrive to the conclusion that there is no downside in emotional health/wellbeing - change definition of what “living full/happy life” Then parents stop perceiving DS as a concern
I wanted to respond to multiple comments with the touching speech of Frank Stephen (a man affected by Down syndrome) before the US Congress in 2017, so I'm posting it to the top level instead.
It's a complex issue but I think listening to Stephen will add a valuable perspective.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vtS91Jd5mac&pp=0gcJCfwAo7VqN5t...
We also would do good if we'd learn from books like 1984 or brave new world.
do you give the same worth to a human "life" at 10 weeks as you do at 9 months?
wileydragonfly•6mo ago
shadowgovt•6mo ago
donsupreme•6mo ago
heavyset_go•6mo ago
There are companies right now making bank on embryo selection based on genetics, the next step is modifying genes instead of rolling a crap shoot and hoping to get what they want.
Funnily enough, such companies are funded by and led by some HN subcultures' favorite people, I would know because I was recruited by one of them who went out of their way to not mention that their marketing material to parents says they intend to let parents pick embryos based on perceived intelligence based on genetics.
Tldr: there are monied parties that want this and they literally cite Gattaca as their inspiration
Marciplan•6mo ago
123yawaworht456•6mo ago
wileydragonfly•6mo ago
chrisweekly•6mo ago
This construct is a bit of a head-scratcher that takes away from the rest of your comment; "failed to mention" would've done the trick. As for Gattaca as a source of inspiration for future parents... yikes.
heavyset_go•6mo ago
They emphasized certain genetic selections that sound good, but failed to mention that the leadership, investors, marketing and customers are actually really concerned with this one specific trait that sounds bad, that's selective omission.
toast0•6mo ago
tobinfricke•6mo ago
renewiltord•6mo ago
You have to be of the right genetic origin because of the source data, but the truth is it's very risky to do embryo editing. It's hard to tell which way things will land. For all we know, gametogenesis may arrive first. And if that happens, then selection will suffice.
im3w1l•6mo ago
Can you explain what this means? After thinking it over, the most plausible reading to me is that they think the results will not generalize to other origins than the ones they have data for?
renewiltord•6mo ago
tptacek•6mo ago
heavyset_go•6mo ago
I met with Hsu before I realized who he was or what he was doing. A choice quote[2]:
> Testing embryos, however, is hugely controversial, because of both the scientific limitations of such polygenic scores and the prospect of designer babies. Undeterred, a company called Genomic Prediction last year began to offer to test cells plucked from an IVF embryo for millions of DNA markers to produce risk scores for some common diseases and for "intellectual disability" or low IQ. Co-founder Stephen Hsu, a physicist at Michigan State University in East Lansing who has branched into genomics, says that for now, the company is not returning genetic scores predicting high IQ because "society is not ready for it."
As for motivation:
> In July 2012, Michigan State University named him vice president for research and graduate studies. At the time, Inside Higher Ed and Lansing State Journal described the appointment as controversial, due to Hsu's comments endorsing research into using genetic modification to increase human intelligence, and his blog posts describing human race categorization as biologically valid.
And Hsu's cofounder[3]:
> Laurent Tellier, the founder of startup Genomic Predictions, used the 1997 movie “Gattaca” as inspiration for a DNA screening method that scores embryos with risk estimates for diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses – and gives a report card on their predicted height and intelligence.
There's also Thiel investments in some people with questionable histories[4] when it comes to IQ PGS.
If you look at who is pushing for this, a lot of them are LessWrong and IDW adjacent, and they're selling to their audiences who believe strongly in things like IQ, genetic determinism and race. They take it very seriously.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/what-is-geno...
[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/screening-embryos-iq...
[3] https://nypost.com/2019/11/09/genetic-test-aims-to-predict-a...
[4] https://undark.org/2023/10/27/consumer-genetic-testing-scien...
tptacek•6mo ago
renewiltord•6mo ago
nice_byte•6mo ago
shadowgovt•6mo ago
Technically, 99% of Down's cases aren't hereditary (it's a spontaneous mitotic change), so you don't "improve the gene pool" by excluding it; as far as we know, basically anybody can have a kid with Down's syndrome if the mitotic dice come up snake eyes.
(But in the sense most people understand the term? Yes.)
SoftTalker•6mo ago
vtbassmatt•6mo ago
throwaway342334•6mo ago
Just because something is labeled "eugenics" doesn’t automatically make it bad or good—outcomes depend on how ideas are applied.
Historically, eugenics didn’t have genetic tools, so efforts focused on social policies, like promoting abortion or family planning, to influence who could reproduce.
heavyset_go•6mo ago