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Indeed. So let's focus on the modal case where people are overwhelmingly likely to conceive again after aborting a down syndrome baby.
This is my point, that outside the cases of highly geriatric pregnancies we're talking about trading off a down syndrome child for a neurotypical child.
We could also trade off dumb and ugly and sad children for better ones, I guess. It's not a slope I'd care to find myself on and I have zero faith in others to not keep sliding down it.
Okay. So you do concede that in most cases we're talking about trading off down syndrome children for neurotypical children. Let's return to my original question to you.
No, I don't concede that. There's nothing stopping parents from just having another child (outside of etc. etc.) and having both is much better than killing one and only having the other.
Nothing outside of the finite human fertility window, of course.
We've addressed this and I invite you to move on to another topic. (And should mention that I'm about done with Motte time for the day)
I don't see how we've addressed this. The number of children you can have is finite. In most cases, aborting a down syndrome pregnancy means you can use that time to have a neurotypical child while not changing the total number of kids you have. It's a direct tradeoff and I'm confused why you are arguing with what's basically a mathematical fact in my view.
https://www.themotte.org/post/3792/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/452288?context=8#context
This doesn't address the true constraint - financial resources and parent time/attention - at all. Sure, I guess theoretically a husband and wife could pump out more and more babies until they reach a certain age, but the reality is that most families these days have 1-2 kids, and a lot of the reason for this is the financial/time resources needed to have more. A Down's syndrome kid very obviously takes a lot more resources to raise, though it is perhaps a fair point that a great deal of these resources will come from society/taxes (public school or other programs) rather than the family; since a Down's syndrome kid might need a lot less college/etc money than a normal kid, I'm actually not sure I'm willing to take a strong position for the family's finances/attention either way. Possibly, it ends up a wash and comes down to someone choosing between having only one kid (with Down's) or being forced to forego one of the two normal kids they would have. Personally, I would choose the non-Down's choices. I mean, maybe you are thinking of someone with unlimited financial/family resources, in which case fertility/biology is a more reasonable binding constraint, but I think we should obviously think of a typical family for which money actually exists.
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