I personally would adopt if I knew I had something like that could be passed down. Not only is it unfair to the child but it’s also a lot of stress and guilt on the parent watching their child go through that.
My personal opinion is yes. I knew a guy with Celiac that was adamant about having having his own biological children. I found it really selfish to potentially, purposely saddle your own children with something like that.
It depends on a lot of factors, including the specifics of the disorder and the values of the adult considering parenthood.
I do a lot of support work in spaces where heredity of disease is a big factor.
Some of these parents go ahead and have kids with their disorders (almost always because their own experience of life with the disorder is overall favorable).
Some become pregnant and monitor the pregnancy and then test to know if the child will be affected. If the child is affected, then they have a choice to make. Those who find their way to my community end their pregnancy.
Still others use reproductive technology called PGD to test IVF embryos for the disorder before deciding whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy by implanting them in the uterus.
And still others decide not to have biological children or not to have any children at all to eliminate any chance of passing on the disorder.
I have immense respect for all of these paths. I have seen good, responsible parents choose all of them.
The cases I find the most ethically difficult are when the adult is seriously intellectually impaired by the disorder, and isn’t fit to parent. These cases aren’t who I’m working with, but I know it sometimes happens that the person with the disorder wants to have children but isn’t capable of making a responsible decision for the sake of a healthy child, let alone a sick child. That’s an incredibly hard situation for everyone involved, including the caregivers of the intellectually disabled adult who would become the de-facto caregivers of yet another generation of affected children.
As someone with inherited problems I’ve suffered for my whole life (part of it is cosmetic and highly visible), you should burn in hell if you pass a condition on that condemns your child to be singled out by society their whole life.
I get that many people try to be inclusive and I’m grateful for that. But I should not have to spend every day of my life fighting the other people who aren’t. I shouldn’t have to cringe in public when somebody says “Look at that!” and laughs and tries to get a picture of me to post on their chat. I should have been able to participate in things like gym and sports and other fun stuff, not have people pity invite me knowing I wouldn’t be able to fully fit in. I shouldn’t have had to face medical problems and their painful solutions every day.
Instead, my parents put “everyone should have children” over “should we have children” then spent their entire lives regretting my existence. Once they had a “normal” child (2/6 lived one is normal) they dropped me like a hot potato. I was the unlucky roll, and once they rolled a 20 they had no more use for me.
Please don’t decide for your child that they should be okay living disabled or disfigured, or with a hereditary illness that will devastate their lives. That’s not your call to make. If your child is somehow born disabled God bless them and I hope they have a happy, productive and fulfilling life. But to choose it for them is heinous.
There’s a guy I know that has a really awful heredity disease. Like it’s an absolute miracle he’s lived to 35. He has four kids and three of them now have the same disease. They’ve almost lost one a few times now.
I always think of him when these kind of questions come up bc I think he was incredibly selfish to have kids. I can almost be ok with one kid bc you might get lucky. But any more than that is basically a death sentence for your kids.
I think the comments on here say quite a lot about our attitudes to disability actually.
If we’re going to say it’s immoral, we have to establish which conditions are considered serious enough for this to be a problem. For example, it’s quite common for deafness to be hereditary – would we say that it’s immoral for a deaf couple to have a child if their child was likely to be deaf? Because I think a lot of deaf people would really object to that – it suggests that their experience of life and the value they add to this world is lesser than that of people who can hear. I find that really problematic.
And this last point can be extended to most things. If it’s a hereditary condition, that means the parent was probably born with it as well (there are exceptions to this, such as HIV which you can be born without, pick up during your life and then pass onto a child – but most of the time the parent will have been born with it). And having a disability presents challenges, I don’t think anyone will argue that it doesn’t. But ask any disabled person the question, ‘Is your disability such a hindrance to your quality of life that you think things would be better if you hadn’t been born in the first place?’ and nine times out of ten they’ll give you a firm no, and be offended that you asked the question. And if disabled people don’t think like that, it’s absolutely not right for able-bodied people to think like that.
I also think you could extend this discussion beyond disability. For example, if you were a white person who married a black person, would you think, ‘Should we have kids? Or is it too much of a risk that they might be bullied and harassed for being mixed-race, is it immoral to do that?’ Think about it. Think how that sounds. Think about whether you’d be comfortable asking this to anyone you know whose partner’s skin is a different colour to theirs, and you have your answer.
There are options like IVF with genetic screening if you want to have healthy kids without passing it on. Although that can be hard in freedom countries with no healthcare…
The problem with this is that, while I personally chose not to have kids because of my health (I’m ending everything, the generational trauma AND the collection of genetics that led to my life)… But at some point, the conversation starts to sound eugenicsy.
You could argue that it’s wiser and preferable for you to remain childless under that circumstance but the act of having children under those circumstances is not immoral in and of itself. Life is not painless, life is full of suffering and it may sound noble to remain childless all in the name of “avoiding pain” but the reality is that no person has the power to eliminate suffering from life. The “logical” conclusion to this idea would be that having any children at all is immoral because they may suffer during their lives (they will).
It depends really. If it’s a life altering thing that will leave them hardly able to live then maybe it’s irresponsible ya, if it’s something light and you’re living a good life then it’s fine. I’d never dissuade anyone from kids as it’s the most meaningful part of your life once you have them but that’s down to the individual I guess.
It really depends on what the condition is. My friend has NF (neurofibromatosis), a condition that causes tumors to grow in your body. She’s had too many surgeries to count and lives in chronic pain. She used donor eggs to conceive her 2 kids. In her situation, she couldn’t bear the thought of watching her children suffer the pain she lives with.
I’d be doing a lot more research. Everyone has some weird genes, doesn’t mean they’ll switch on. Have a look at your relatives/ancestors diets/lifestyles too. A condition can be caused by adverse conditions in pregnancy, even lack of direct sunlight will have poor outcomes.
It really depends on what you mean by “high” likelihood and by “passed on”.
I’ll avoid the long explanation and just summarize my point in a few remarks:
There is no significant harm in passing on a condition if its threat is being minimized as it is being passed on, leading to eventually its eradication.
As long as you do not pick a partner who suffers from the same condition, the above remark holds. i.e, your offspring will at most be carriers, and the chance of their offsprings carrying it becomes even less, and so on.
If you suffer from a genetic condition and you pick a mating partner suffering from the same condition to have children with, then yes, you’d absolutely be immoral and a douche too!
Had similar though. Turn the question around: do you think your condition is so bad that you wish you weren’t born at all? And if yes then why didn’t you commit suicide do far?
My mom died of a genetic condition when I was 13. I vowed to never have kids.
When I met my wife, she very much wanted kids. After some digging, the genetic condition had been essentially cured, meaning any of my descendants will live a normal life unaffected by my mom’s condition.
You never know what’s going to happen in the future.
Fun fact: my mom was in the control group for the clinical trials for the drug that is now used to treat her condition.
I wouldn’t call it immoral but I do believe it would be wrong. Why would you want to pass on the genes that would cause your children so many woes and problems (at best) or curse them to a painful and potentially shorter life (at worst)?
Do you know for sure that you’ll be shortchanging them? No. However, as an adult you should understand probability.
I don’t know. It’s a complicated issue and probably depends on a lot of factors, including the specifics of the disorder. There’s nuance. Also, not all disability is life-threatening.
If I just had autism or just had anxiety, then I wouldn’t be worried about having biological children. But knowingly passing down a disability that will result in death or a failure to live a good quality of life is sort of shitty. Idk. I don’t want kids and never have wanted kids, even completely ignoring my issues, so it’s a tough one for me to answer.
I have conditions that are partly hereditary; genetics are a strong component but not the whole cause.
My parents could have realized there was a strong likelihood that I would have my chronic illnesses. I don’t think they did, but I don’t blame them.
Why? Despite my chronic illnesses, my life is worth living. Sure, it’s more challenging, but I’m happy. And I wouldn’t automatically assume that my kids would suffer horribly, because I don’t. So, if I wanted them, I’d have kids (I don’t want them, though).
Depends what you mean by serious, and how treatable it is.
I have ADHD and diabetes. Both potentially serious if unmanaged (the diabetes especially), but that’s unlikely to ever be the case for my daughter. I know what symptoms to look out for, and doctors know how to treat them.
I have Celiac Disease and I was diagnosed after my children were born. Had I known before hand, I would have strongly considered not having children- and it makes me very glad to have been diagnosed later rather than sooner. This disease sucks but they’ll grow up well informed so they can have the privilege of making informed mistakes.
Yes. There is no way we should still have bleeders in 2025. We have known for two millennia that haemophilia is inherited. Known for nearly two hundred HOW it was passed on. Been able to check DNA for it for more than forty years now. People have no damn business having baby haemophiliacs or babies with cystic fibrosis. Those genes should have been eliminated by now.
My niece has a rare neurological disease. For her, it was totally random. Neither of her parents are carriers. For others, one or both parents are carriers. Almost all couples stopped having children once they found out they were carriers because they were not willing to risk bringing a second (or third depending on when they found out) child into the world with such a disease.
This reminds me of a Youtuber I used to watch wayyyyyy back in the day. She found out that she was a carrier for DMD after her second child was diagnosed with it. Even with knowing this, she still went on to have three more kids without any sort of safeguard. Just my personal opinion, I was disgusted by her decision and stopped watching her entirely.
Lung cancer gene carrier. Might get hit in my 60s. I’m in my mid-30s and my dad is in his mid-60s. Never smoked a single day of his life. Only rarely drink socially. It’s in the gene and unavoidable. It is extremely draining to deal with a sick parent (especially for Asian).
At my dad’s last chemo session, I saw a young woman receiving chemo and her mother (50-60s) was with her.
I don’t want to watch my children getting cancer or have my children in their 20s watching me have cancer.
It’s complicated from a philosophical point of view. The least suffering we can always guarantee for any child is to not have them at all. Every life will be full of suffering, and an average child will be born to a life full of risk. Is simply knowing that one of the risks is a certainty mean their life is less meaningful and capable of fulfillment? Obviously, it depends on the level of suffering and whether that suffering may outweigh or prevent fulfillment and enjoyment of life. That is never going to be a clear line. Some people with Downs Syndrome live rich, fulfilling lives. But then there are congenital defects that will leave a child unable to ever speak, eat, or move on their own, and are constantly in pain. It’s hard to argue they are getting much out of life. Finding that line is an individual decision based on unique variables of each circumstance, and the values of the parents to the potential children, which can move the line drastically.
I’m autistic and technically sure, it’s a serious hereditary condition. I also think my existence is valuable to the people I love and society in general. My neurotype tends to encourage fixations and detail oriented observations, which have been valuable assets to many fields throughout human history. I received an award for innovation just a couple years ago in my field. I also have had traumatic struggles to connect with my peers and fit in with people who weren’t like me.
I have two kids who are also autistic. Every day we discuss social norms, stims, and how we handle overwhelm and feelings. I’m incredibly proud of my 3 year old who is learning to recognize when he’s getting overstimulated and leave for a quiet place already, something I still struggle with at 37.
Diverse human beings are incredibly important for society. Our existence does not need an excuse or shame for daring to continue and propagate more of ourselves any more than yours does.
I have two such conditions, and for me, yes I think it’s completely immoral and have a hard time not judging those who intentionally make people to suffer from diseases they know they carry. I find it unconscionably cruel and selfish.
Does the condition have a massive negative impact on quality of life? Are you able to care for your children? Will having the children put you at a much higher risk of not living to see them reach adulthood?
Comments
I don’t think, no. I see the logic behind it but I disagree with the notion.
We don’t have universal, objective morality, so the only person who can really answer this is the individual.
I would likely choose to stay childless in that situation, though.
I personally would adopt if I knew I had something like that could be passed down. Not only is it unfair to the child but it’s also a lot of stress and guilt on the parent watching their child go through that.
You could definitely make the argument that it is
Not exactly.
You know the answer!
My personal opinion is yes. I knew a guy with Celiac that was adamant about having having his own biological children. I found it really selfish to potentially, purposely saddle your own children with something like that.
It depends on a lot of factors, including the specifics of the disorder and the values of the adult considering parenthood.
I do a lot of support work in spaces where heredity of disease is a big factor.
Some of these parents go ahead and have kids with their disorders (almost always because their own experience of life with the disorder is overall favorable).
Some become pregnant and monitor the pregnancy and then test to know if the child will be affected. If the child is affected, then they have a choice to make. Those who find their way to my community end their pregnancy.
Still others use reproductive technology called PGD to test IVF embryos for the disorder before deciding whether or not to go forward with a pregnancy by implanting them in the uterus.
And still others decide not to have biological children or not to have any children at all to eliminate any chance of passing on the disorder.
I have immense respect for all of these paths. I have seen good, responsible parents choose all of them.
The cases I find the most ethically difficult are when the adult is seriously intellectually impaired by the disorder, and isn’t fit to parent. These cases aren’t who I’m working with, but I know it sometimes happens that the person with the disorder wants to have children but isn’t capable of making a responsible decision for the sake of a healthy child, let alone a sick child. That’s an incredibly hard situation for everyone involved, including the caregivers of the intellectually disabled adult who would become the de-facto caregivers of yet another generation of affected children.
As someone with inherited problems I’ve suffered for my whole life (part of it is cosmetic and highly visible), you should burn in hell if you pass a condition on that condemns your child to be singled out by society their whole life.
I get that many people try to be inclusive and I’m grateful for that. But I should not have to spend every day of my life fighting the other people who aren’t. I shouldn’t have to cringe in public when somebody says “Look at that!” and laughs and tries to get a picture of me to post on their chat. I should have been able to participate in things like gym and sports and other fun stuff, not have people pity invite me knowing I wouldn’t be able to fully fit in. I shouldn’t have had to face medical problems and their painful solutions every day.
Instead, my parents put “everyone should have children” over “should we have children” then spent their entire lives regretting my existence. Once they had a “normal” child (2/6 lived one is normal) they dropped me like a hot potato. I was the unlucky roll, and once they rolled a 20 they had no more use for me.
Please don’t decide for your child that they should be okay living disabled or disfigured, or with a hereditary illness that will devastate their lives. That’s not your call to make. If your child is somehow born disabled God bless them and I hope they have a happy, productive and fulfilling life. But to choose it for them is heinous.
There’s a guy I know that has a really awful heredity disease. Like it’s an absolute miracle he’s lived to 35. He has four kids and three of them now have the same disease. They’ve almost lost one a few times now.
I always think of him when these kind of questions come up bc I think he was incredibly selfish to have kids. I can almost be ok with one kid bc you might get lucky. But any more than that is basically a death sentence for your kids.
I think the comments on here say quite a lot about our attitudes to disability actually.
If we’re going to say it’s immoral, we have to establish which conditions are considered serious enough for this to be a problem. For example, it’s quite common for deafness to be hereditary – would we say that it’s immoral for a deaf couple to have a child if their child was likely to be deaf? Because I think a lot of deaf people would really object to that – it suggests that their experience of life and the value they add to this world is lesser than that of people who can hear. I find that really problematic.
And this last point can be extended to most things. If it’s a hereditary condition, that means the parent was probably born with it as well (there are exceptions to this, such as HIV which you can be born without, pick up during your life and then pass onto a child – but most of the time the parent will have been born with it). And having a disability presents challenges, I don’t think anyone will argue that it doesn’t. But ask any disabled person the question, ‘Is your disability such a hindrance to your quality of life that you think things would be better if you hadn’t been born in the first place?’ and nine times out of ten they’ll give you a firm no, and be offended that you asked the question. And if disabled people don’t think like that, it’s absolutely not right for able-bodied people to think like that.
I also think you could extend this discussion beyond disability. For example, if you were a white person who married a black person, would you think, ‘Should we have kids? Or is it too much of a risk that they might be bullied and harassed for being mixed-race, is it immoral to do that?’ Think about it. Think how that sounds. Think about whether you’d be comfortable asking this to anyone you know whose partner’s skin is a different colour to theirs, and you have your answer.
no it isn’t,have kids anyway.
There are options like IVF with genetic screening if you want to have healthy kids without passing it on. Although that can be hard in freedom countries with no healthcare…
Yes, I believe it is. But people continue to reproduce and have severely handicapped children anyway, every day.
To me it’s a form of child abuse when you know they won’t have a normal chance at life.
The problem with this is that, while I personally chose not to have kids because of my health (I’m ending everything, the generational trauma AND the collection of genetics that led to my life)… But at some point, the conversation starts to sound eugenicsy.
You could argue that it’s wiser and preferable for you to remain childless under that circumstance but the act of having children under those circumstances is not immoral in and of itself. Life is not painless, life is full of suffering and it may sound noble to remain childless all in the name of “avoiding pain” but the reality is that no person has the power to eliminate suffering from life. The “logical” conclusion to this idea would be that having any children at all is immoral because they may suffer during their lives (they will).
I think it depends for me. If it’s a recessive trait and my partner doesn’t have that trait, we’re golden.
I’ll be sure they get genetic testing later on so they can make informed choices when they are older.
If they will get the trait and it compromises quality of life dramatically. I would likely decide against it.
If I knew I carried something like that,I wouldn’t choose to have kids.
It depends really. If it’s a life altering thing that will leave them hardly able to live then maybe it’s irresponsible ya, if it’s something light and you’re living a good life then it’s fine. I’d never dissuade anyone from kids as it’s the most meaningful part of your life once you have them but that’s down to the individual I guess.
It really depends on what the condition is. My friend has NF (neurofibromatosis), a condition that causes tumors to grow in your body. She’s had too many surgeries to count and lives in chronic pain. She used donor eggs to conceive her 2 kids. In her situation, she couldn’t bear the thought of watching her children suffer the pain she lives with.
I’d be doing a lot more research. Everyone has some weird genes, doesn’t mean they’ll switch on. Have a look at your relatives/ancestors diets/lifestyles too. A condition can be caused by adverse conditions in pregnancy, even lack of direct sunlight will have poor outcomes.
It depends. Autism and Huntingtons are not the same.
Yes.
> highly likely to be passed on to any offspring
It really depends on what you mean by “high” likelihood and by “passed on”.
I’ll avoid the long explanation and just summarize my point in a few remarks:
There is no significant harm in passing on a condition if its threat is being minimized as it is being passed on, leading to eventually its eradication.
As long as you do not pick a partner who suffers from the same condition, the above remark holds. i.e, your offspring will at most be carriers, and the chance of their offsprings carrying it becomes even less, and so on.
If you suffer from a genetic condition and you pick a mating partner suffering from the same condition to have children with, then yes, you’d absolutely be immoral and a douche too!
Yes, but it is more immoral for anybody else to stop you if you choose to do it anyway.
Had similar though. Turn the question around: do you think your condition is so bad that you wish you weren’t born at all? And if yes then why didn’t you commit suicide do far?
My mom died of a genetic condition when I was 13. I vowed to never have kids.
When I met my wife, she very much wanted kids. After some digging, the genetic condition had been essentially cured, meaning any of my descendants will live a normal life unaffected by my mom’s condition.
You never know what’s going to happen in the future.
Fun fact: my mom was in the control group for the clinical trials for the drug that is now used to treat her condition.
Anyone who knows that they have a hereditary condition shouldn’t even think about having kids.
Happiness!!
I wouldn’t call it immoral but I do believe it would be wrong. Why would you want to pass on the genes that would cause your children so many woes and problems (at best) or curse them to a painful and potentially shorter life (at worst)?
Do you know for sure that you’ll be shortchanging them? No. However, as an adult you should understand probability.
Adoption exists and IVF with genetic screening exists. Knowingly passing on a disease like Huntington’s is just cruel.
How serious? On the one hand, there’s some familial hypercholesterolemia in my family. OTOH, 3/4 of my grandparents have lived past 85.
I don’t know. It’s a complicated issue and probably depends on a lot of factors, including the specifics of the disorder. There’s nuance. Also, not all disability is life-threatening.
If I just had autism or just had anxiety, then I wouldn’t be worried about having biological children. But knowingly passing down a disability that will result in death or a failure to live a good quality of life is sort of shitty. Idk. I don’t want kids and never have wanted kids, even completely ignoring my issues, so it’s a tough one for me to answer.
I have conditions that are partly hereditary; genetics are a strong component but not the whole cause.
My parents could have realized there was a strong likelihood that I would have my chronic illnesses. I don’t think they did, but I don’t blame them.
Why? Despite my chronic illnesses, my life is worth living. Sure, it’s more challenging, but I’m happy. And I wouldn’t automatically assume that my kids would suffer horribly, because I don’t. So, if I wanted them, I’d have kids (I don’t want them, though).
Depends what you mean by serious, and how treatable it is.
I have ADHD and diabetes. Both potentially serious if unmanaged (the diabetes especially), but that’s unlikely to ever be the case for my daughter. I know what symptoms to look out for, and doctors know how to treat them.
I have Celiac Disease and I was diagnosed after my children were born. Had I known before hand, I would have strongly considered not having children- and it makes me very glad to have been diagnosed later rather than sooner. This disease sucks but they’ll grow up well informed so they can have the privilege of making informed mistakes.
Morals….about genetic? Ha ha ha ha
Yes. There is no way we should still have bleeders in 2025. We have known for two millennia that haemophilia is inherited. Known for nearly two hundred HOW it was passed on. Been able to check DNA for it for more than forty years now. People have no damn business having baby haemophiliacs or babies with cystic fibrosis. Those genes should have been eliminated by now.
I think it would depend on what constitutes serious and the available treatments.
My niece has a rare neurological disease. For her, it was totally random. Neither of her parents are carriers. For others, one or both parents are carriers. Almost all couples stopped having children once they found out they were carriers because they were not willing to risk bringing a second (or third depending on when they found out) child into the world with such a disease.
This reminds me of a Youtuber I used to watch wayyyyyy back in the day. She found out that she was a carrier for DMD after her second child was diagnosed with it. Even with knowing this, she still went on to have three more kids without any sort of safeguard. Just my personal opinion, I was disgusted by her decision and stopped watching her entirely.
Here’s my comment from another post:
Lung cancer gene carrier. Might get hit in my 60s. I’m in my mid-30s and my dad is in his mid-60s. Never smoked a single day of his life. Only rarely drink socially. It’s in the gene and unavoidable. It is extremely draining to deal with a sick parent (especially for Asian).
At my dad’s last chemo session, I saw a young woman receiving chemo and her mother (50-60s) was with her.
I don’t want to watch my children getting cancer or have my children in their 20s watching me have cancer.
Yep this is the route I’m choosing. Bipolar is a bitch.
It’s complicated from a philosophical point of view. The least suffering we can always guarantee for any child is to not have them at all. Every life will be full of suffering, and an average child will be born to a life full of risk. Is simply knowing that one of the risks is a certainty mean their life is less meaningful and capable of fulfillment? Obviously, it depends on the level of suffering and whether that suffering may outweigh or prevent fulfillment and enjoyment of life. That is never going to be a clear line. Some people with Downs Syndrome live rich, fulfilling lives. But then there are congenital defects that will leave a child unable to ever speak, eat, or move on their own, and are constantly in pain. It’s hard to argue they are getting much out of life. Finding that line is an individual decision based on unique variables of each circumstance, and the values of the parents to the potential children, which can move the line drastically.
Example disease: Cystic Fibrosis.
Hella immoral. Don’t have kids if both spouses are gene carriers.
Am gene carrier and am fixed.
because fuck that.
Well is it a manageable one or a one way ticket to pain and suffering?
“Serious hereditary condition “ encompasses a lot
Either way, there will be a reckoning once that kid finds out they might pass it on or, worse, express the phenotype.
I’m autistic and technically sure, it’s a serious hereditary condition. I also think my existence is valuable to the people I love and society in general. My neurotype tends to encourage fixations and detail oriented observations, which have been valuable assets to many fields throughout human history. I received an award for innovation just a couple years ago in my field. I also have had traumatic struggles to connect with my peers and fit in with people who weren’t like me.
I have two kids who are also autistic. Every day we discuss social norms, stims, and how we handle overwhelm and feelings. I’m incredibly proud of my 3 year old who is learning to recognize when he’s getting overstimulated and leave for a quiet place already, something I still struggle with at 37.
Diverse human beings are incredibly important for society. Our existence does not need an excuse or shame for daring to continue and propagate more of ourselves any more than yours does.
I have two such conditions, and for me, yes I think it’s completely immoral and have a hard time not judging those who intentionally make people to suffer from diseases they know they carry. I find it unconscionably cruel and selfish.
Does the condition have a massive negative impact on quality of life? Are you able to care for your children? Will having the children put you at a much higher risk of not living to see them reach adulthood?
I would consider it immoral, and it’s one of the many reasons I chose not to have children. I think it’s irresponsible, and borderline sadistic.
Most bad genetic traits are recessive, so premarital testing can opt your kids out. Otherwise sperm donors are cheap.
its absolutely immoral