Blood test findings by Toronto doctors can detect cancerous tumour before it develops::Doctors at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre and The Hospital for Sick Children are helping detect cancer in some patients before a tumour develops or shows up on a medical scan.
I’m not saying this to be mean or intentionally offensive. I genuinely am having a hard time understanding the logic: If you know that you have a genetic mutation that will be fatal 100% of the time, and which generally only allows you to survive for a short period of time beyond your early reproductive years, why would you have kids? It seems selfish to me, that these people understand their condition but still choose to doom their progeny to the same fate.
Not discounting that logic, but it is also possible that the genetics of your partner get passed on for that gene instead of yours.
The part of the logic I’d struggle with is that if you only survive a few years after their birth, you’re creating an offspring that will loose their parent at a very young age and potentially putting your partner in a precarious position as a single parent. Not to mention the fact that every day you’ll look at your kid and think “I’ll never see them grow up, or graduate or get married or …” seems like a constant reminder of your upcoming doom.
We’re normalized to it, but having kids at all is selfish. You’re dooming a consciousness to death.
You know what is fatal 100% of the time? Living at all.
Reproduction is not about logic anyway, it’s just a very common and fundamental feature of life. People who are disabled or fatally ill also have ordinary dreams, desires and human rights. Framing the issue as “these people are dooming their progeny” makes it seem like their own lives are worthless because they will die young, as if the value of human life rested on longevity. It’s quite frivolous to assume we can understand the desire to have kids of people with such diagnoses.
No? You can adopt, have fulfilling lives, and just not literally doom your progeny to have the same dooming condition you were born with.
If you have such a terrible genetic condition, it doesn’t diminish your worth as a human, but I won’t restrain from openly judging you if you decide to make the choice of giving that condition to another human being for no other reason than just you feeling like it just because you want kids – which again you can adopt, so there is really no excuse other than selfishness
I realized why your comment bothered me so much: I am kind of an antinatalist myself, so for me having children is always dooming them in some way, especially nowadays when our civilization is on the brink of collapsing, but I don’t judge these people to be more selfish than the usual. People with Li Fraumeni Syndrome have a 50% chance to pass down the mutation to their offspring, it’s no certainty, and the article is clearly showing current technology can detect cancer earlier so people can act upon it. You are calling these people, who have cancer or mostly certainly will, selfish, when you don’t have the faintest idea of what it means to live in their shoes. If it is selfish or not, that is something for their children to decide, not you. Passing shallow moral judgment on the reproductive decisions of disabled/sick people is very dehumanizing, not to say it’s one of the core elements of eugenics ideology. It’s not hard to see how your standing would enable a more extreme view arguing that people with Li Fraumeni Syndrome should be sterilized.
Acting solely on primal instincts is dehumanizing.
If i knowingly gave someone HPV, leading to cancer, nobody would dare to bring up eugenics, and my right to reproductive freedom. How is giving cancer to a stranger different from giving cancer to my kids?
Well said