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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how it is ethical AT ALL to let new children have Down syndrome when we have the ability to eliminate the gene.

If Nazis hadn't practiced eugenics it wouldn't have been shuned as it is today.

There's nothing wrong with eugenics in itself, just with how it's applied.

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The social effects at scale are what bothers me. Just wait a century until employers put "no genetic defects" in their job applications. Or parents who decide to have old fashioned non-designer babies have trouble getting their kids insured. Or homophobia will become normalized again because "they should have fixed it in the womb". Is this a sufficient reason to not prevent genetic defects? Who can say.

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

It's one thing for the parents to decide, quite another for a bunch of politicians to decide who gets to be born.

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

So there is a moral imperative to abort fetuses with Down's syndrome?

Wow, that is certainly difficult to explain.

Now abortion has become a moral imperative in some cases...

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.

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