A lot of people in the anti-abortion camp are criticizing this post. And I get it. I’m not countering them. But one thing I haven’t seen anyone say, at least not explicitly, is how little epistemic humility this guy, and people like him, have. And this complete lack of epistemic humility results in them playing God and making inapt comparison—comparisons they cannot possibly make because they cannot rightly evaluate the two alternatives.
This man and his wife were informed that their child would have a series of medical difficulties, both physical and mental. We know that about Down Syndrome. We know that by almost any metric this is a “harder” life than someone without any such condition. But these people turn around and say “and, thus, it would be better for the child if the child actually just died now.”
But they can’t know that. They can’t actually compare existence with Down Syndrome to non-existence/death, because they don’t know what the latter entails. In order to rightly and ably compare two things, you have to know enough about them. We don’t know enough about death to ably compare it to life—even life with difficulties. So one cannot truly and reasonably say “death is better than living with Down Syndrome.”
It would be like me asking “do you prefer to eat apples or smoogaboogaloogas?” Of course, you don’t know what a smoogaboogalooga is, so you would reply “uh, I don’t know what that is, so I can’t compare it to an apple.” That’s epistemic humility. This guy and his wife have none of that, because they decided that death (which they cannot understand and appreciate) is better than life.
But even now I’m being charitable. I’m assuming a lack of epistemic humility when in reality they weren’t deciding what was “best” for the child (death vs. life). They were deciding what was best for themselves. And they decided killing their child was best for themselves.
As bad as the description of these events was, the footage is so much worse.
British police restrained a teenager and forced him to bleed to death because the brown person who stabbed him said "racism."
Everyone needs to remember the case of Henry Nowak.
@tedcruz You wish I hadn’t pointed out that 95+% of my opponent’s funding came from the Israeli lobby, and millions of that came from a woman who has Israeli citizenship and served in the IDF?
Sorry for your feels Ted.