this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Not everyone should be allowed to have children. Why? Because i believe my parents shouldn't have had children. But here i am anyway ;-)
I think most people agree that not everyone should have kids, the problem comes with coming up with criteria, genocide is unfortunately far too tempting to ever give that power to any individual or organization imo. People are better at policing it than you think though, so long as they have easy, stigma free access to the tools to control it themselves.
Thats called eugenics. Has anyone told you that?
Ok, question is if that's Fundamentaly bad...
Does a person with a 100% change to produce offspring that will suffer through a very short life need offspring or are they better off not suffering?
While we can entertain the idea that some people shouldn't breed(genetic defects that lower the quality of life for the individual or society) or shouldn't raise children(stupid raises stupid), there's no neutral authority that can make and enforce judgments. Even if we make an AI to do it, it would just reflect the view points of the people who made the AI or the sample set that was fed to the AI.
The best we can do is make a society strong enough to cope with these issues, either new and better genetic treatments or more robust public schools systems.
There's plenty of examples across different societies in the 20th century alone that practiced one form of eugenics or another that we now find appalling. Here's an article describing some from the late 20th century US.
It shouldn't be up to the government to say that.
Yes it is because noone else has the authority to do so. Unless you make a law where doctors have the choices but that would result in worse problems.