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This is an important insight, and I have observed this same phenomenon even among people whose loved ones have far more minor mental health issues. My very good friend has a brother who is autistic and extremely-online; he has no criminal record that I’m aware of, and seems completely harmless - just spergy and aimless. My friend is always talking about how important it is to “protect and advocate for the mentally ill” and seems terrified that some authoritarian crackdown on violent schizophrenics would inevitably expand to targeting her brother for eugenic cleansing. I see the same thing with the families of people with Down’s Syndrome: the specter of Nazi death camps looms over their minds and appears to lurk behind every corner, hiding behind efforts to enforce literally any negative consequences on any mentally-ill person. This seems to be yet another sensible public-policy front which has been irreparably tainted for a century by a certain mid-century Austrian painter.
To be fair to the Down's Syndrome families, the push towards elective abortion for this cause does induce a kind of paranoia, because it is demonstrated that society thinks it's not alone acceptable, but moving towards compulsory, to abort such children. There's resentment dressed up as compassion around "who will take care of them when they're adults and their parents are too old or even dead? that's an expense on society".
There's public intellectuals willing to spout off on your moral duty around that. Or doctors going "Well we don't judge in such cases, but we think it's paternalism to make women wait three days to get an abortion" when speaking in the context of "how many pregnancies are terminated in such cases?" That was around the campaign for a Constitutional amendment to permit (limited) abortion in my country; before it became legal, the reassurance was all "No, it won't include disability as a reason"; afterwards, we get a newspaper article talking about how it's not covered under "fatal foetal abnormality" so women have to go abroad for a termination. What makes that relevant here is that part of the campaign for abortion in Ireland over the years included "women have to go abroad for a termination, it is much safer if they could receive such medical treatment here". I don't think it's unreasonable to see that as a call for including Down's Syndrome as another permissible grounds. The switch between "no no no we don't want to abort the Downies/actually yeah it should be legal to abort the Downies", you see?
So it's not the failed landscape painter at fault here, it's the entire system of "well of course you'll want an abortion, when do we schedule it?" around diagnosis, and even the whole practice of having routine amniocentesis to detect such conditions. That's helpful to let families prepare, but the end result is "95% termination" not "preparation to have a child with this condition". Or that it's been legally upheld that Down's Syndrome is one case where you can have an abortion up until birth:
I can certainly see grounds for paranoia, even if it's unreasonable (as yet).
I mean, look, I’m basically in total agreement with the people strongly encouraging women to abort all Down’s Syndrome fetuses. Abortion is a very difficult issue when it comes to public policy, and I’m not willing to say that mandating the termination of such pregnancies would be the optimal legal approach.
However, this is a wholly separate issue from the removal of obviously-ill adults from public spaces. The constituency calling for broad coercive efforts to remove the mentally ill from public transit has close to zero overlap with the consistency attempting to get women to abort babies with mental illnesses. Now, I personally would love it if these two consistencies to converge, as I would be an enthusiastic member of such a hypothetical coalition; the reality at this time, though, is that they are two separate and unrelated - in fact, usually two diametrically opposed - political phenomena in every first-world country worth discussing.
I get what you're saying, but I'm saying I can also understand why people in that situation would be twitchy about anything that looks like cracking down on the visibly mentally ill.
Because all the promises about "of course we don't mean your baby" have turned out to be lies.
There should be a way to get laws about adults who need to be institutionalised can be taken off the streets even against their will because they are not competent to make decisions and they are not acting in their own good, but the way things work it's plausible that there would be a lot of vague language inserted for both those who don't want to 'stigmatise' and those who do want to be draconian, and that this kind of language could be interpreted in unintended ways when it comes to provision of services and legal cases. As well as a shit-ton of scaremongering - look how Aduhelm got approved even over FDA resistance, because of the canny use of patient's groups and families of sufferers who were whipped up to protest about "this would cure my mom but the cruel bureaucrats are wrapping it in red tape!"
I don't trust public policy motives because the entire topic is way too politicised. You would have idiots screeching about how this is throwing the mentally ill and the homeless into cages and hellholes.
To make sure I understand you - are you saying you would support coercing women to have abortions against their will in such cases? Because if so, do you really not understand why people would have "the spectre of Nazi death camps looming" when you're saying in effect "pass this legislation and then we can get on to the whole Lebensunwertes Leben bit"? Because while I'd support "if we need coercive laws to solve this problem for the good of all including the homeless/mentally ill, okay", I'd definitely oppose you on that last. And if you make one conditional on the other, then sorry, one set of principles over-rides the other for me, thus blanket refusal.
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