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April 15, 2002
Monday
 
 
The difference between rational moral selfishness and sociopathic selfishness
Perry de Havilland (London)  Health

Several bloggers have reported on the story of a deaf lesbian couple who selected a deaf sperm donor to maximize the chance that 'their' daughter would be born deaf. And this is what indeed happened, producing perhaps the world's first designer handicapped baby.

The way I see it, it is no better, and no different, than if these vile despicable sociopathic women had taken a child and jammed a sharp pencil in its ears to make it deaf. They have intentionally caused harm by any rational objective measure, they are merely using genetic predispositions, rather than sharpened pencils, to do it... it is not a random defect because they have loaded the dice to get the result they want and actually went looking for a donor with defective genes.

I hope the child grows up to hate them for what they did and to do harm back to them. In any reasonable society, the action of these 'parents' would be an objectively criminal act quite different from the tragedy of random birth defect. These vile creatures belong in jail for their de facto assault on 'their' child.

I am strongly in favour of genetic engineering but would regard creating sentient beings intentionally disabled as just as monstrous as what these evil women did by 'selective' breeding.

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