Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 12:41:15 2006/07/12
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by Maureen
You miss the point entirely when you write that "none of us have any say in the circumstances of our birth," since the discussion is about the people who DO have a say in the circumstances of our birth, i.e., our parents.
While it is no doubt true that, if you decide to have a child despite the great and measurable risk that you will be bringing a human being into the world with a terrible disease, that child might win a lottery and still be happy, or might be so self-delusional, so drugged on fatuous optimism, or so good at lying to himself about the realities of his situation that he will not suffer from the disease as much as logic would dictate.
But these compensatory factors are, in contrast to the risk for diabetes itself, NOT AT ALL CALCULABLE, and could, indeed, BE JUST THE OPPOSITE! So there is just as much chance that the child on whom the parent decides to place the risk for diabetes would be overly pessimistic as overly optimistic, and this over-developed pessimism combined with diabetes would plunge the child into insanity or suicide.
The only factors you can rationally and morally take into account in making the risk/benefit analysis of whether to have children or not are those which can be objectively known as likelihoods in advance. You can't weigh in all the unknown possibilities as though they were factors as real as the diabetes risk.
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