There must be some selection effect at work. "Those who live with them" are the ones who have chosen to live with them, which excludes:

a) all who have learnt about the situation before birth and chose abortion,

b) all who gave the kid away to some institution.

A N == 1 case from my life. My classmate had a Down kid at 20 - very rare, as Down is not typical in young mothers. She seems to be happy, even though she sacrificed her dream of a bigger family for him; it was so challenging having a Down kid that she didn't have any other.

But the father absconded and wants nothing to have with his disabled son.

Counterpoint. My youngest son has DS. He's an absolute nightmare sometimes.

Whereas some children might get into a mood and be ok after an hour, he does not unless his environment is changed.

He will literally scream or moan non stop for 6-8 hours (yes you read that right, and it's no exaggeration). He would do this when in environments he doesn't recognise, so imagine an airplane, imagine a restaurant, imagine a trip out...

We can't do those things anymore because of the actual judgement we get from other people (oh and I could write a post on this alone).

Then, when we return him to the car to drive home, his behaviour instantly turns to a smile and blowing raspberries.

We also can't get respite, our parents are too old, friends don't feel right babysitting, council services won't yet see him as old enough or have no availability, so it leaves us hiring privately, which is expensive, difficult and low availability.

Of course this takes its toll on our mental health, his sibling and us.

So on one hand I'm pleased it can soon be stopped for others, but on the other it makes up my son's behaviour, who I absolutely love regardless of the impact he has on us without realising, because there are times when you will see the stereotypical love and happiness when it is unexpected.

But I would not say I have greater happiness.

> Surveys have consistently shown that they and those who live with them (which is no safari) are happier than everyone else.

Can you point to any that you have read?

Slippery slopes abound everywhere.

The fact that you'd be crushed at a depth of (IDK, 2km or so?) underwater doesn't make "swimming" unhealthy.

My concern with eugenics is that it's a thing which various groups of extremely narrow-minded bigots push for to promote mutually exclusive ideals, ideals which often have much the same level of biological awareness as an untrained idiot picking up a scuba kit and trying to walk from London to New York along the sea floor.

If we go slowly and carefully, if these treatments are optional and not mandatory, we might be able to build a better world without such self-righteous bigots. But this is definitely a case where we want to be slow, spreading this over multiple generations if we can, because we don't know the limits of our own ignorance.

Would you want your children to be gay? As a straight person, given the choice I would want my children to be straight, so they could have biological children with their partner and a dating pool of ~48% of the population rather than ~2%. Those are pretty clear objective advantages, even putting aside the issue of societal acceptance.

It's completely understandable to have an attachment to one's own identity, but at a certain point trying to impose that identity on one's children becomes ethically questionable. A good example is the deaf community - would it be appropriate for a deaf couple to withhold medical treatment from their child that would allow them to hear? I would argue no, but some people disagree.

>That is not a simple test. Ask any straight person if they’d want to turn gay, the vast majority would say no. My guess is they’d say no if you asked the same question about their children.

The way you can wildly change the answer to this by changing the age, gender and marital status of the subgroup of straight people you ask is a lot more interesting than the answer itself is.

Gideon’s Crossing:

“[A cochlear implant for my kid?] You think hearing people are better than deaf people?”

‘I’m saying it’s easier.’

“Would your life be easier if you were white?”

>But I’m gay, and while there are pros and cons to it, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Having Dawn syndrome is severe impairment.

Being gay isn't an impairment. At least nowadays in US. I'm not sure you would feel the same if you were gay in Chechnja ... where supposedly gays just don't exist, and when something like gay happens the family deals with him themselves (the rule there - either the family deals with their own member, or the society will deal with the whole family). Especially if it were about your children.

I don’t think this is true. Two counterexamples: Huntington didn’t have Huntington’s; Wilson didn’t have Wilson’s.

In the UK for example we don’t go for this performative anti-apostropheism that Americans are so fond of. So it really depends on where you’re from.

I never knew why the possessive wasn't used, thank you!

Thank you! I will keep that in mind.

This was the premises for the movie Gattaca (1997). One of my favorite movies as a kid.

This research is about removing the extra chromosome, so having the same child be born without the disease, not about aborting the child...

The article is literally about removing the extra chromosome and not aborting the fetuses...

But yes, I do actually think there is a moral imperative to abort fetuses with diseases that will extremely negatively impact the life of the person and of the people who will have to care for them.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't care for them if they happen to be born, not at all, but I don't really understand how it can be controversial otherwise.