Quote:
Originally Posted by desertgrandma
Like mentally retarded people. Tell me, Harry, how does procreation become a right for these?
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The same way it did for everyone.
Even if you were to start from this perspective, the next question would be "Ok, so people with an IQ below 70 aren't allowed to breed, but people with an IQ of 75 aren't that much brighter," and 80 after that. You need to realize that while some forms of retardation are heritable, but others are not. The latter could very well produce "viable" offspring, even though they might be more heavily retarded than mild cases of DS patients. So where do you draw the line, and based on what? Behavior? Heritability?
Or "sorry, but black people are statistically
too likely to become addicts, and we can't have situations where crack addicts become pregnant, so we're going to preemptively sterilize them." Unless you want to give them mandatory abortions as soon as you find out they're pregnant, which would likely "offend" the Christians, so it's probably more politically viable to sterilize them and be done with it.
Once the precedent would be there, the argument that the practice was absolutely indefensible would be gone, and it would just get expanded upon, as there would be no real reason to stop it: the criteria for sterilization are too vaguely defined, and the cutoff points/"requirements" too arbitrarily chosen to be able to say with certainty that "creating this rule is rational whereas creating that one is not".
Which is why they banned the practice in the USA in the 70s, and which is why it's in the Rome statutes, and the declaration of the rights of man.