Comment by onemoresoop
Comment by onemoresoop 16 hours ago
> various disability communities would not like me since, among other things, I strongly advocate for pre natal testing and elective abortion of people with serious issues like blindness.
I think they're right to not want you around them, you sound odious to them and your ideas are very questionable. Where do you draw the line as there are various degrees of disability. What if you discover that you yourself already have a disability such as lacking empathy for example and while you adapted to your life well someone comes along advocating to terminate pregnancies with your condition?
The idea that people who advocate for harm reduction lack empathy itself lacks empathy.
I would 100% support a mothers right to choose, and if that meant that any one of us did not exist because of it, so much the better. A life not lived is guaranteed harm/suffering that didn't happen. This is consistent with negative utilitarianism, which is a better moral or ethical framework than any other. Also consistent with Jainism, which is the only religion in the world that means it when it preaches non violence (but is down with suicide)
A whole lot of the world believes in reincarnation (~1 billion people), and have advocated for positions similar to this in their extensive bodies of philosophies for millennia. The idea that we are not to help someone on their way to the next, hopefully better life is just as silly sounding to them as it is for me to go to the 1 billion+ abrahamites around the world and tell them that heaven/hell isn't real.
Simply admitting that some conditions make life not really worth living for a lot of people is not worth getting worked up over, especially when it bears out in data that blindness definitely does make people want to choose that option. I can't always blame them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4624868/
Quoting the abstract
"Mortality was significantly increased in the visually impaired (SMR = 1.3; 95% CI 1.07–1.61), but in gender-stratified analyses the increase only affected males (1.34; 95% CI = 1.06–1.70) and not females (1.24; 95% CI 0.82–1.88)"
Most of the lack of increase in Mortality is explained by women trying and failing to commit suicide far more than men. I'm sure they tried more often too, but this was not explored in the paper.
From https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... (2024, systemic review/meta analysis):
"The findings of this systematic review and meta-analysis support the association between visual impairment and increased risk of suicidal tendencies. The risk differed by age group, with a pronounced risk observed among adolescents."
It is unpalatable to talk in such a direct way about these things, but like a lawyer who has the benefit of distance away from the problem of a client, I, fortunately am not blind, and this is sometimes a good thing. Insular communities can and often do have bad takes and need the rest of the world to hold them accountable.