Friday 9 March 2007

Eugenics

The petition is entitled STOP ALLOWING JUST ANYONE TO GIVE BIRTH!! and the explanatory notes say
"How hard is it to take home an animal from a shelter?Endless personal checks &weekly visits before you can think about taking that animal home!Adopting a child?Not just anyonecan do it &there’re very good reasons why Think about it anybody can give birth, anybody can have a child Anybody!?No checks no way of ensuring the child will be cared for &provided for No way of checking if that child is being born into a life of drug &alcohol abuse or if the mother is stable &can offer her child a secure home &give her child what it needs Let’s not be ignorant, in the world we live in today if a child is to survive it needs more than love Let’s give the children of the future what they deserve & stop the starving, homeless &emotionally screwed up children suffering anymoreStop allowing anyone to have a childWhen you& I are no more &the generations after that &after that who will be here?? We need to make a big change &where better to start than with the beginning of a life Please supportme"

Wow. Get the grammar! Get the punctuation! Get the obsession with eugenics!

I suppose I should first point out how unworkable the plan is: people who want to have children will do, and will find a way around any restrictions. This is not conducive to happy or healthy children. It is simply not functionally possible to control people's fertility.

But even if you could find a functional way of doing it, it is impossible to imagine it not becoming a source of abuse in itself. There is no way of measuring "deserving humans" - no way of being certain that a person will be a good parent, or not an abusive parent. What's more, situations can change in the sixteen years of childhood; a perfectly stable person at a child's birth may be a hopeless addict and abuser by the time the child is a toddler. As soon as you draw a line saying "this person is worthy and this person is not" you create divisions in society. And as soon as you allow such lines to be drawn, people will start trying to abuse them - people who believe that, say, only white people should have children, or only educated people should have children, or ... whatever their preferred form of discrimination.

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