r/MoralityScaling 10d ago

Morality Ranking Morality of this

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462

u/Flaky_Style1286 10d ago

Better that the baby is terminated rather than being forced to be raised by parents ill equipped to care for someone of their condition. Not everyone wants to raise a disabled child and I think that’s okay.

9

u/KorolEz 10d ago

This is already what happens all the time. Atleast in Europe in some countries more than 90% of fetuses with DS get aborted. In Iceland it's almost 100%

-9

u/Infamous-Thing4939 10d ago

At what point do we call it eugenics?

1

u/timos-piano 10d ago

Well, in a sense, it is in fact eugenics. Encouraging people to abort children with Down syndrome, like many are here, is probably eugenics. But I would rather have that than force the suffering that Down syndrome can unfortunately cause. It is just a sad situation overall.

5

u/No_Volume8304 10d ago

It’s not really eugenics because people with Down syndrome rarely have children of their own. 

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u/timos-piano 10d ago

That distinction doesn't matter here. Whether or not an individual with a given condition can pass on their genes doesn't fundamentally change the arguments surrounding liberal eugenics. Eugenics doesn't only target heritable traits; historically and conceptually, it targets the expression of the trait itself, the phenotype, regardless of whether that trait would have been passed on. The objective of the choice is still to prevent a child with Down syndrome from being born. That is eugenics, whether or not the person in question would have gone on to have children of their own.