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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   23176 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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they probably never have another normal child because they don't have the resources

Bloody hell. I work in a service that deals with children with additional needs, and I can tell you about at least one family that had a Down's Syndrome child, then the second pregnancy was normal. Today I read the obituary of a woman in my county who had fourteen children and a normal life (not on welfare, not lower class, lower middle to middle class lifestyle).

So people, unless they're your special bubble of "oh no, unless we can afford at least 200k per year to raise little Timkins until he hits the age of ten and then we need even more money, we cannot possibly have a child" can and do manage to have children. "My child is disabled" is not a reason for not having kids.

Stop trying to justify "I think these pregnancies should be aborted for eugenic reasons" with "having these kids stops people having normal babies", because it doesn't.

I am reminded of this man born to a family with dwarfism. Both his biological parents and siblings have it, but he was a normal, healthy child and grew to be 6ft tall, and according to a DNA test he took, his future kids will probably be normal as well. But growing up as the youngest child in a family environment like that wouldn't have been easy. You'll have to accept early on you'll have a shorter childhood and grow up quickly, because parenting a child with special care needs is extremely stressful, requires heaps of attention, and more often than not results in the breakdown of relationships.

Bro is living out Tiptoes IRL.

Yeah but on the other hand having a young child is already super stressful and resource-intensive, much less having a developmentally-disabled one who requires far greater investment of resources and effort. You'd have to be crazy to expect that there isn't atleast one couple that's being nudged from Yes to No on having a second child if they've gotta deal with a first disabled child. You're also more likely to have to opt into a cesarean or early birth with some conditions for the child and that increases the trauma of delivery/chances of complications that render carrying further children unsafe.

I do agree with one level (especially with larger families frequently hitting a point of economies of scale as sheer numbers means the labor associated actually diffuses especially with siblings reaching sufficient age to help out) that people are capable of having large families

Very nice set of anecdotes.

Stop trying to justify "I think these pregnancies should be aborted for eugenic reasons"

The eugenic solution would be to not have any other child after the first downer. Downers rarely reproduce so there is little risk there but there could be a genetic component (although it seems that it is rare) and that would be a reason to avoid healthy carriers.

Downs is a trisomy, not a mutation, so there are no healthy carriers in the sense that there are for e.g. haemophilia or cystic fibrosis.

(There are genes which somewhat increase the odds of a Downs baby, but the effect is small compared to maternal age).

Gosh, "downer", such an edgelord!

Mind you, I'm the fool for responding to the "haw haw I'm fourteen and think I'm so smart pranking the adults" bait, so congratulations you.

If we're edgelording, I prefer "Mong". It's the term that was used in British school playgrounds when I was in school, though as with all such terms more for people who acted like they had Downs than for people who actually did.

Yes, if we must descend to name-calling, let us at least use the time-honoured insults! No need to reinvent the wheel with "downer" (can't you just hear the chortling about the ever-so-witty pun involved, because they're a downer in the slang sense too, don't you get it?)

Down's syndrome is a chromosomal abnormality that is nearly always [i]de novo[/i]. Male Down's syndrome sufferers are nearly always sterile; females are not always sterile and if they have a child they are very likely to have a Downs child. So strictly genetically, having a Down's syndrome boy is isogenic, having a Down's syndrome girl is dysgenic, and having another non-Downs child is no different than if the first Downs syndrome child didn't happen. But going a little wider, you're likely to have fewer children after a Down's child because of the massive amount of resources the Down's child takes up, so if you've got good genes, having the Down's child is dysgenic for that reason.

FYI you put text in italics by putting an * on either each side.

either

each

There's the wrinkle that choosing to have a severely disabled child also imposes a burden on their siblings, particularly after you're dead. Some parents explicitly think of this as their lifelong care plan; others just implicitly let this happen. Impressively, somehow making "I'll let society deal with it" seem relatively responsible.

We're all getting better and better every day, society is more humane, AI will make us all rich post-scarcity, we can colonise the galaxy and be little gods of our own worlds - and yet somehow putting any of that wealth into services for more humane living for all people is impossible.

You see why I'm so sceptical of all the dreams and wishes around transhumanism and the rest of it? We're gonna live forever - but we can't manage to cobble together some system of support for the most vulnerable among us, no that would be too much of an imposition on society.

There are enormous systems of support that are essentially unprecedented in human history. Spazzing wildly any time someone is somewhat skeptical of a particular system providing utility commensurate with it's costs is why a lot of countries are in a fiscal mess on health and disability spending.

It’s not eugenic reasons. If a woman aborts a fetus with down syndrome because she calculates that it will ruin her life, this may be a eugenic act but it certainly isn’t done for “eugenic reasons”, any more so than a violent thug killing someone with some condition is doing it for “eugenic reasons” instead of unrelated ones.

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