12:22pm August 4, 2013

➸ The Feesh Groper: The human race is going to breed itself to extinction.

feeshgroper:

youneedacat:

feeshgroper:

In the past 24 hours, I have seen two people wracked with seizures from two different genetic medical conditions. I am not in a human medical field, this was in my own home and the home of my boyfriend.

Consider this a PSA. If you or your lover have a painful condition that could be passed on to…

Why? Because people are more than our conditions. By those standards nobody in my family should have reproduced. Because you’re basically saying is better never to have existed then to have chronic diseases or pain. Like all the is to our life is suffering and that’s the only factor that should come into play when deciding whether to bring us into the world.

Pretty much everyone in my family has a disability, or chronic pain, or chronic illness, or all three. You’re saying if we’d known, then my grandparents shouldn’t have existed, my parents shouldn’t have existed, and I shouldn’t have existed. But all of us are DAMN GLAD WE EXIST.

You can’t base whether someone should come into existence in just one trait like that. Our lives are more than just suffering. You can’t predict whether you will bring into the world a child with a severe illness who loves life, or a healthy child who hates life. It’s better not to base your decisions on one attribute like that.

And that’s why people are upset. Because you’re condemning people who do nothing wrong. Bringing a child into the world is not wrong no matter your genetics. There are kids who live only five years ago love every moment of their life, and kids who live to eighty only wishing it would be over. It’s a personal decision whether to have kids, and by judging people so harshly for bringing another life into the world you’re intruding on that decision. Your disclaimers don’t make it better. They just excuse people who didn’t know. You’re still judging people who did know. And people like my parents who would still have had us if they’d known.

Personally I am glad that my parents would have chosen to have me. My diseases don’t define me or whether I should have existed or not and I think that’s a really twisted way to view people, reducing a very big and complex thing like a person down to a single trait and making your decisions based only on that trait.
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Of course you’re glad you exist. So am I. but I would rather have existed without my medical conditions.
Yes, your life is way more than just your conditions, no one is disputing that. However, wouldn’t you rather have been born without chronic pain?
You need to look a little deeper than “but then I wouldn’t exist". Think a little more about what it means to be a conscious being, and how your personality or “soul" developed during your life.
If you had been born to different parents and adopted by your current ones, you would likely still be very much the same mentally as you are now, but without your condition. Wouldn’t that have been preferable?

For me, it wouldn’t have been preferable. I’ve thought about it in a great deal of depth and written about it in detail before. But that’s a personal thing to each person.

But that’s not the choice you make when you decide not to have a child, and to adopt another.

Let’s say in one universe you have a biological child named Maria, with all these inherited conditions.

And let’s say in another universe to decided not to have a biological child, but adopt a child named Jessie.

Jessie is not Maria.

Jessie is not who Maria would have been, minus the hereditary conditions.

Jessie is an entirely separate child who would have existed whether you had Maria or not.

So if my parents didn’t have me because they were afraid of genetic conditions, I wouldn’t be here, ever. Which is fine if it’s their choice. But if they then adopted a baby, that baby wouldn’t be me, given a chance to live as a healthy baby.

As of right now, we don’t have the technology to conceive a baby and then strip them of their genetic conditions. Which is the only possible way that your idea could happen - that my parents could have had me, but given a chance at a life without those conditions.

But I’m not even sure that would always be ideal. We don’t know everything genes do. We don’t know how much changing genes for diseases would change the whole person. It just makes me uncomfortable.

And I seem to have inherited, at minimum, sensory neuropathy, autonomic neuropathy, and a possible form of myasthenia, from my mother. All of which have resulted in a variety of other conditions. And I’m not totally sure I would have wanted to be born without them, even though they come with constant pain and possibly a reduced lifespan.

(The autonomic neuropathy causes gastroparesis, which causes me to inhale stomach contents into my lungs and get pneumonia, and I figure there’s only so many times you can do that and survive. I obviously hope I’m wrong. But I’ve got pretty precarious health and I’ve made my peace with whatever happens.)

Anyway, my problem isn’t that some people choose not to pass on their genetics, just with the idea of condemning people for knowingly having babies who might pass on something genetic.

I also don’t really like the idea that if you don’t have a kid then the kid your parents adopt is the kid you didn’t have. At least that’s what it sounds like? I’ve heard it before anyway and it always confuses me.
Like I have two older brothers. If my mom choose not to have my middle brother, but still had me, I’d still be me, not my brother.

Also some of our genetics in the family affect who we are mentally, so change the genetics and you change that too for better or worse. Neurological conditions tend to run in my family, and that includes both the central and peripheral nervous systems. So in the case of some conditions, there is no bring the same mentally without them. And I like who I am mentally. I owe some cognitive traits I value very highly to one condition, even though it comes with great difficulties as well, in that case the difficulties are inseparable from the strengths.

I’ve thought about this a good deal, and more deeply than you could probably imagine. I just don’t hat the same assumptions about the world that you do, so I’ve come to very different conclusions. I’ve written about them too. Getting pneumonia many times in a year will make you ask yourself the big questions.

Notes: