The new ethical controversy?
 

http://www.twincities.com/localnews/...nclick_check=1

I have thought about this before as a huge ethical problem if I ever decide to have children and I'm sure many of you guys having children or planning on it have thought about this as well. Not an issue I really like discussing but it is important for every parent to think about so here we go...

Just like abortion, this deals with the idea of choice and life but in a different flavor. How ethical is it to be able to screen for disabilities like Down Syndrome and parent's reactions to them?

For some parents it's too much to think about and so they terminate the child. At least, that's the option over here.

I don't think it'd be an option for me and my husband. In fact, we spoke about this very subject just this weekend gone knowing that we're trying to fall pregnant, but getting older and are more likely to have birth defects in a child, the older we get.

I think it's up to the parents to decide though, and most couples that go through these types of procedures are most likely to consider all the eventualities.

I watched friend of the family go through some awful times with their handicapped daughter.

She is 40 something now, with the mind of a 5 year old and some of the things she does to her elderly parents is horrific.

They were nearly 40 when they had her, she beats them up regularly and they have a hell of a time discipling her.

I have a close girlfriend who has a young child with down syndrome and he is the most gorgeous little boy....everyone just loves him completely.

They are members of a small community and we will go to school with kids that have known him since he was born and cherish him for the beautiful little boy he is....would this be different in a huge school? I dont know.

I believe it is the right of the parents to have all the tests they can afford.

A lot of doctors will recommend the tests to mothers who's worrying is getting out of control and not beneficial to a healthy pregnancy.

It can also be seriously traumatic to have something like this thrust upon you at birth, rather than having months to come to terms with it.

I would prefer pregnant couples have all the information at hand and be able to make informed decisions that is best for them, whether that be to terminate or mentally prepare themselves for the journey they will be embarking.

Science is at our disposal.
Modern medicine must be used.
Now I don't know about aborting retarded fetuses or whatever but I just think that the more advanced medicine becomes the more obligated we are to use it to better mankind. Already we are living longer, healthier lives. It's in due course, in my opinion.

What a controversial opinion!

Survival of the fittest?

I think abortion should, as a rule, always be legal. That means I have no problem with abortion being legal for parents who want to prevent their Downs fetuses from being born. But it makes me a little queasy.

A friend of mine had a baby/fetus that she aborted because it had a serious birth defect. One that would cause the baby, if born, to have a short and painful life that might last as long as a month or two in the hospital. It was a gut wrenching decision for her, but I think she did the right thing. I have no problem with that at all.

So I support and even encourage having an abortion when the fetus has a serious birth defect like the one above.

Downs is tougher. To make it personal, I've got a mentally retarded cousin, and while she has been quite a burden at times for her family, she is living on her own now, and leads a good and productive life. She's a great person. I'd be horrified at the thought of killing her.

To me, though, abortion isn't killing a person. It's more like erasing the life that could have been. It's hard to image what life would be like for me and my extended family if my cousin had never been in it. Maybe it would be a better life for us, maybe it would be worse. Who are we to even be making that choice? Well, this gets into religious beliefs and the morals/ethics of each family. So I'm going to cop out and say that it's really up to the parents. And I'm OK with that.

I agree with glatt. The other thing you have to remember is, specifically with Down's Syndrome, there is no foolproof test before birth. They measure the thickness of the skull with ultrasounds, and the thicker the skull, the more likely Down's is. But they can't know for sure until they do a genetic test after the baby is born. A friend of mine was told her baby had a 90% chance of having Down's, and they chose not to abort. Her daughter turned out fine, with absolutely no mental defects. There are many other diseases, however, where they can know for sure.

Well, there is amniocentesis, but it's a little risky, and it's never done routinely because of that risk. Around 1% of fetuses are killed by the procedure.

I don't think screening prenatally for disease (or curing it, removing it) could be looked at as a bad thing under any context (except maybe religious). I don't see it any different from a more traditional immunization. I think the reason this fellow thought it's not something he wanted to get rid of, is that this is what he's used to. Making his son healthy would mean making him a different person, and he obviously loves the person his son is.

is that good?


But back to the issue. A close friend of mine and his wife were told after all the tests that their daughter would be born with Down's. He discussed abortion, how hard life would be, etc. Their daughter is now 7 and absolutely healthy. no defects whatsoever.

For some reason I thought an amnio couldn't be used for Down's testing, but a quick Google search shows I'm clearly wrong. What I don't get is how the test could be wrong, as in lookout's anecdote. Either the extra chromosome is there or it isn't... LabRat? Any clues?

Any tests accuracy is affected by how much of a stoner the lab tech is (my mom worked at a physician services lab for a while, told me some stories...) but in also in this case maybe it's mosaic down's?

sorry, i can't offer any clarification. i'm sure they were told more details but the story goes that they were cautioned about the complications of raising a child with Down's but they chose to go forward anyway. She is a perfectly normal kid. annoying if you ask me, but i guess that makes her normal.:p

Another thing to consider is that there are levels of disability within each syndrome. Some people with Down's syndrome reach the point where they are able to cope with, and interpret, the world with the competancy of a young adult . Others are more severely disabled and will require more in terms of care. If a child is always going to require full time care, the parents are not necessarily able to guarantee that: or at least, they may not be able to guarantee loving care.

I can't access the link - it's asking me to sign in.
I assumed the controversy in question was whether you would completely eradicate Down's Syndrome if you could, without bringing abortion into the question.

I know this same issue came up about dwarfism before, and certain types of hereditary blindness.

I'd be for it. I don't agree that it is a gift, and if there is a way to prevent it occurring I would take it, personally. I sure there are many people with Down's who are happy, healthy and lead fulfilling lives. Probably more so than me. But if I could choose, I would never want to start a child in life with limits or disability. Then again, I don't want any children so perhaps my heartlessness takes me out of the equation.

Why isn't it good?

I think that the tests should be available, and I don't think it should be illegal to abort a fetus due to test results. After all, all families are different and not all would be able to care for a severely disabled child. For a poor family (who would currently be less likely to have access to prenatal testing), it can be devastating.

My mom is in a book club with a group of friends, many of whom met because their children go to the same school for mentally challenged kids. All of them love their kids, who range from completely autistic to slightly retarded, and are glad to have them despite their difficulties. However, all of these moms are successful career women and/or married to successful career men, live in some of the poshest neighborhoods in the area, and are able to send their kids to a special school and get them excellent medical care. I don't expect every family to be able to have the same success that they have.

A lot of people feel that the increase in human life spans is bad for the planet as a whole.

i didn't say it wasn't good, i was just curious about why you would assume it was.

personally i have no interest in extending the duration of my life. now if you can show me how to keep my body working the way it was at 29 for the 70 years then let's talk. I'd like that. But if everyone on the planet is doing the same thing we could run out of space pretty quickly.

With the overpopulation thing, it isn't so much of how many people there are or how they live, but how they live their lives. The world could potentially support a population twice the size it is now but we would collapse instantly if half the population lives at 1st world middle class standards.

then why would we even want to do something that would increase the population?

We don't, but when you talk about abortion at a personal level, overpopulation very rarely comes into the picture.

Only if everyone keeps having children at the same point in their lives. When the life expectancy was 40ish, people were getting married and having kids at 15 quite regularly. As life expectancy extends, the average age for a first child has continued to go up and up--and our expectations of maturity have delayed as well, which is disappointing to me. Time was when a 15-year-old was an adult, and expected to behave as one. Nowadays there are 22-year-olds who are still coddled by their parents and are years away from adulthood.

I agree with this. In some cases, genetic screening can change a child's life. A friend of mine found out that he and his wife were having a child with spina bifida. Because it was caught early, they were able to correct it in utero. Then there are children who are, say, hydroencephalatic. They're going to die, usually soon after birth. I wouldn't want my child to have a few hours of misery just to satisfy someone else's idea of morality.

Some people can deal with extreme birth defects. Some can't, for whatever reason: emotional, financial, whatever. Personally I don't like the use of abortion as birth control; I think adoption is a better choice. But I think that couples should have all the information they can get, for exactly the above reason: so that they can mentally prepare themselves to deal with it, or decide whether or not to choose another option.

Well then the world certainly cannot support twice the population can it?

If we build up like the Japanese.
TOKYO has 36 mil pplz!!!

Hell, Beijing has more people than the entire state of Alabama...

What?? Since when?

He's lying, he means the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area. Or Largest Urban Agglomeration. But Tokyo is the biggest city by far.

How many/what other cities does that include beyond Yokohama (which puts it around 16m)?

Also - The Bos-Wash Megalopolis is over 44 mil if you're going that way with it...

I believe that given there are tests available for Downs syndrome, people should be allowed to take them and given the option of termination (after counselling). However I would not take that option. I'm not sure if I would have the tests. I would like to be prepared if I were going to have a Downs child, but I would not want a test that would risk the life of the fetus. But that's just me -I am in a position where I could cope if I had to. Many many people are not.

However, if science advanced to the point where (say) people could be vaccinated against conceiving a Downs child, I'd be all in favour of that. It's wonderful that there are lovely people with Downs. They'd probably still be lovely without it... and they and their parents probably would have a better quality of life, even though that must be the hardest thing for families living with Downs to admit.

I got my info off Wiki. It's a college student's "Bible." Not sure about stretching Boston all the way to DC, Wiki just showed NYC-Newark as #3 largest agglomeration and Tokyo as #1.

BosWash wiki.

Dang. I guess it doesn't qualify.

Actually, in the industrialised West, the clustering of children into the early years of marriage only really began to happen around about the middle of the 20th Century (life/marriage patterns began to change from about 1870 onwards, certainly in England, but I believe in America as well). Prior to that the median age of women at the birth of their last child was about 39 and many of them continued having children into their forties. This obviously allows for extremes either side and must also take into account that in some areas of the country life expectancy was low by modern standards. Marriage age dropped considerably after the second world war, despite the fact that life expectancy had risen considerably (not sure if this also applied in the States, but was certainly the case over here). The fall in marriage age helped bring the median age of the mother at the birth of her last child to down to about 28.

You're right in that many medieval cultures considered young teens to be adult, but that changed centuries before the industrial age. You're also right that we are now moving into an era where the first child is tending to happen later, except for in those areas or communities we consider to be 'problematic'; but it isn't simply that as we live longer we spend more time in an infant state. The changes relate more to other external factors.

I don't know for sure that we can support a population twice the size it is now but we can support a population bigger than it is now if we really tried, those people being born in extreme poverty being the catch.

Well from a moral perspective this simply isn't acceptable. Why increase the number of people living in poverty?

Wouldn't it be better if the birthrate were controlled somewhat and population decreased so that no one needs to live in abject poverty?

From a view just looking at larger society, yes, definitely, but how do you enforce a one child policy without authoritarian control and taking away individual rights?

If you want to lower population growth without authoritarian control the ingredients are freedom, education, and wealth. But it is very unrealistic to spread those to every third world country with high population growth.

Just deny them access to medical treatment.

Then you just end up with this

How much medical treatment do you think they have access to?

Would I abort a fetus if I knew it had down syndrome. I don't think so. I truly do not believe so. So many of the kids that I coached at the Special Olympics would not have been "better off". That's crazy.
I can't wait for the day that we give an egg and sperm to the Dr. and you get your zygote engineered genetic disease free, and with the sex you want.
You can even pick your hair and eye color.
It is right around the corner.
Science is there to use.

Vincent Freeman, Gattaca

I'll stick with random chance, thank you.

Somehow this is just screaming dystopia...

When you can start actually picking traits as more preferable than others then the whole discrimination and supremacy thing will intensify again and that is never good. The getting your children disease free is always good though.

But one man's disease is another man's lifestyle. how would you feel is a fundamentalist (of any type) was the one who got to choose?

"yay! we fixed it so no more homosexuals!"
I'm not sure i see the value outweighing the dangers in any of it.

Mostly. Genes are very complicated. Being susceptible to some diseases may protect you against others. But people with major genetic flaws are not usually reproducing anyway. The time to worry is when we start meddling with the little stuff.

Ah, very good point.

I personally don't feel that *as a parent* it is ethical to screen for this and other disabilities. That said, I don't judge parents who do and I can certainly sympathize with wanting to know in advance so that there was time to adjust and possibly mourn the loss of dreams of having a 'normal' child ... by aborting a fetus OR by just taking the final months of pregnancy to come to terms with the possible projected outcome: a disabled child.

As a medical professional and/or member of a greater society, I have more room to justify the ethicality of these screenings. I'd go so far as to say that we ARE ethically bound to offer these screenings.

Welcome to the muddled mess that is my mind. :blush:

I didn't screen or test during my pregnancies, and won't with future pregnancies. But I know that I can handle what comes my way, and I acknowledge that not everyone is like me. We all have to trust our guts and do what feels right *to us* damning what anyone else things or judges to be right *for us*. FWIW in regards to a later post, I don't partake in traditional immunizations either and I tried to generate a separate thread to expound on that but apparently I'm too new to create a thread of my own :3eye: LOL.

-V-

Well, hurry and post a few more posts, I'm looking forward to reading your thread.

vivant introduces an interesting ethical question with the immunization issue.

vivant, I'm interested to hear your perspective on the argument that as more parents choose not to immunise against, measles, mumps and rubella, reduce the overall levels of immunity and increase levels of the disease for the population as a whole?

I've finally been bestowed with the appropriate powers :) see new thread -

Social Obligation & Immunization

*grins* Hooray! Go Vivant *does the first post dance*