Down's Symptoms May Be Treatable In the Womb 170
missb writes "US researchers have found that prenatal treatment for Down syndrome works in mice. This raises the possibility that a pregnant woman who knows her unborn child has Down syndrome might be able to forestall some of the symptoms before giving birth. When fetal mouse pups that had a syndrome similar to Down's were treated with nerve-protecting chemicals, some of the developmental delays that are part of the condition — such as motor and sensory abilities — were removed."
Re:Suck em out (Score:5, Interesting)
Isn't an abortion a lot cheaper? I mean, with these genetic misfits being somehow a part of society, we could be doing some damage to our gene pool.
Erm, in case your remark isn't facetious: individuals with Down's Syndrome are typically sterile.
Re:Nice troll, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's uncommon but they can reproduce.
I think the nature of Down's though is that they seldom outlive their parents - life expectancy is much lower.
Re:Nice troll, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend told me about a young man with Downs syndrome who is adept at arithmetic. He lives alone and works as an accountant. Not bad at all for someone with his condition. If only us "normal" people all had the winning attitude and supportive family this man has...
Re:It's a deformed child, not a moral trophy (Score:3, Interesting)
Like children, they may not be demonstratively conscious of the way the world works, but they're chock full of raw instinct. Dogs have the emotional maturity of a 3 year old human but you can still look into a dog's eyes and know exactly what they're feeling.
Re:It's a deformed child, not a moral trophy (Score:4, Interesting)
Can? Sure.
Need to? Hell no, not in a world overpopulated by a factor of 2-5.
I don't have to ask anyone to judge their value in that context. At its coldest, its not hard to judge absolute value -- what is the benefit a birth will bring to society versus its cost.
If you want to talk relative vs absolute, there's a pretty significant percentage of people who end up in the red on that count.
If society has a certain amount of resources available to support the raising of the next generation, and the birth of the child in question will use the resources that otherwise could've been used for ten children without fundamental genetic defects, that's a pretty absolute value judgment as well.
The GP is absolutely right -- we as a society (particularly in the US) fail miserably at making rational judgment calls because of a misguided and unjustified assignment of irrational amounts of value to a bunch of cells.
Re:Apparently, the Eugenics Movement lives (Score:2, Interesting)
Only in Wonderland does all families consider their kids blessings, ESPECIALLY kids with issues. They may not admit it, they may WANT to love them. That doesn't mean they do.
I have a relative with Down's. She is 22 now with the mind of a 14 year old. Now, she is damn happy, as she was in a good part of her life. Happy, but depressed. Knowing how difficult everything was, trying to understand and not been able to rationalize why, and more important, why her.
But sometimes it is not about the kids, it is about the parents. You have no bloody idea how hard it is, how tiresome and how horrible things can be. You may believe that there is this lovable all-powerful man that sent this child to test you, your fate, and if you fail you go to this very miserable place, but I don't. And given the choice, and more important the knowledge that my child would be born with down, or any other very serious handicap I would ask for my gf\wife\whatever to abort. If she didn't want, well, she would have to raise the child alone, because that is something I don't want to pass through again.
Chris Burke (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend told me about a young man with Downs syndrome who is adept at arithmetic. He lives alone and works as an accountant. Not bad at all for someone with his condition.
Ever heard of Chris Burke [wikipedia.org]? Quite a lot of people would be jealous of accomplishments like that.
Re:It's a deformed child, not a moral trophy (Score:3, Interesting)
How people with Down's Syndrome would respond "yes" to the question "Do you wish you born normal, like everyone else?"
How could they say that, when having that genetic defect made them who they are? To answer that question in the affirmative is to admit that they would unmake their entire lives, to never to have existed at all.
The false dichotomy is in the minds of the people who equate that reasoning with suicide, and who believe that aborting a Down's fetus is equivalent to executing a living, breathing child in the name of "eugenics".
(And wow, you make a religion out of evolution. Consider this: evolution only works by natural selection, natural selection works through the failure and death of living things. The entirety of life is an engine of suffering whose only purpose is to ensure that some sequences of molecules replicate at the expense of others. Taking control of that process, ensuring that none of Nature's "mistakes" ever suffer for their inadequacy, is a moral imperative.)