Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 12:05:45 2006/07/10
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by Sarah
I agree with your point entirely, Sarah, and I am always astonished at people who don't seem to understand it. I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when I was 14 in 1966, and when I woke up in the hospital the next day, one of the first and most striking things that occurred to me was that I must under no circumstances ever contribute to imposing this tragedy on anyone else, so I should never have children.
And yet I have known so many type 1 diabetics since then who have had many children and never given a moment's thought to what should have been the most significant moral decision of their lives! One type 1 diabetic friend of mine consulted a genetic counselor with her husband and the advisor told them they should have children, because the 4% chance of a type 1 female having diabetic children was not all that much different from the chance that they would have a child with type 1 diabetes if they adopted one! But of course, this misses the moral point, which is that one must never impose such a risk on someone as yet unborn, who in principle cannot be consulted for his or her agreement.
Another friend of mine, an intelligent, energetic, middle-aged labor lawyer with type 1 diabetes, decided to have his third child just as he was sinking into end-stage renal failure, since he knew that men on dialysis are de-sexualized and so he would soon not be able to have any more children. So he not only exposed the child to a 7% risk of becoming a type 1 diabetic (the risk is higher for male parents), but also condemned him to growing up for most of his life without a father, given the extremely short life expectancy of diabetics on dialysis -- about 8 years for patients in their 40s, as my friend was. He died just 7 years after that decision, leaving his widow to cope with three young children and her grief at the same time.
Some time ago I argued on this message board that the 'cure' for type 1 diabetes in fact already existed and was under the control of the patients themelves, in that all we had to do was stop having children and the number of new diabetics would rapidly decline over the generations. Almost everyone was horrified at my suggestion, and some people even said I was recommending a Hitlerian eugenics program! But the important difference is that, while we must honor the lives of all people now living, no matter how sick or disabled they may be, we need not respect the presumed 'right' of a disease to keep propagating and harming and killing people forever into the furture!
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