Sterilisation

In the 1920s, the government would sterilise people with serious genetic defects such as retardation, serious mental illness and even epilepsy in order to stop these conditions from being inflicted on the next generation. Sterilisation has fallen out of favour. We now treat Down’s Syndrome children as an endangered species that must be preserved with programs to encourage breeding. Sterilisation is disparaged as a Hitlerian project to breed a master race.

I think the old attitude to sterilisation was more logical. Today all we care about are the wishes of the parents. They want the pleasures of raising children. Children are chattels whose function is to please parents. Their needs do not matter. When you allow people with serious genetic defects to have children, you are condemning those children to a miserable life. We would never dream of imposing such a penalty on even a murderer. It is even more wrong to impose a serious disease on an innocent child. It is just as evil as injecting a child with smallpox.

Protecting kids from misery has nothing to do with creating a master race.

Why to people oppose sterilisation so strongly that they make up lies to oppose it? Christianity teaches that you must do absolutely nothing to interfere with breeding, not even masturbate. Sterilisation is the ultimate interference. They do not care how much suffering they create in the process.

You have to be careful not to go overboard. Is the condition usually inherited? Is there a treatment? How unpleasant is the condition? You also want the sterilisation to be reversible in case we devise a cure.

~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)