To give some background, I’m not talking out of my ass here. My father had Multiple Sclerosis growing up, and was unfortunate to be in the minority which gained a form of early onset dementia. He was incapable of an intelligent conversation by the time I was in high school, and broke his hip and became essentially bedridden while I was in college. The last few years of his life he was essentially non-responsive. It became very clear to all of us that there was, in his case, no “there there” – his mind was really slowly vanishing. We made the best decisions that we could, including ending treatment when he had no quality of life. The last thing that any of us needed was some “advocate” who had no idea of the circumstances butting in the middle of family decisions, and making their own determinations, separate from the family, on what would be right for them.

More broadly, I don’t think it’s a slippery slope, because the standard of limiting rights to those who can voice their desires is pretty clear-cut. Arguably, more than few great apes have passed this threshold. There’s a clear slippery slope on the other side of your argument however – as it’s a clear pro-life argument as well regarding fetuses, since it’s another case of human life which is essentially not self-aware (I think the pro-choice movement made a major blunder trying to argue a fetus isn’t alive – it clearly is, it’s just not a person). Although, if you’re coming from the pro-life perspective, viewing “humanity” as central is understandable.

“When you remove those who need this extra help from society…” You have your timeframe backward. The long-term care of people so profoundly incapacitated is an essentially modern phenomenon; in the past such care was simply untenable, and the sufferers either were killed or left to die, or died despite their caregivers’ best efforts. The question at hand is actually how to deal with the relatively recent lifelong inclusion of such people in society.

Acknowlegment of incapacity in some does not equate with, or lead to, arbitrary discrimination toward others. There are countless reasonable and workable means by which a society could determine under what circumstances and to what extent one person’s rights might be ceded to others. One good example – the ability to in some way express one’s preferences – has been proposed in an earlier post above.

Your implication (that the current discussion regarding the rights of caregivers to lessen the burden of caring for the profoundly disabled represents a coarsening of society and an increase in selfishness) is completely off base. Broadly speaking, the disabled are better cared-for today than at any prior time in human history, and they face far less isolation and discrimination than in the past. People of good faith and good intentions hold differing opinions as to how best to accomodate the lives of those who would have been unsupportable in previous eras, and the discussions continue. To imply that one side of this many-sided discussion would lead to social decay is thoughtless and unproductive.

I have family members with either mental or physical disabilities, and both family members have contributed in significant ways to both my family and to society. In neither case did the doctors predict that this would be possible. Is it harder to care for someone with either a mental or physical disability? Yes. Does it require sacrifice on the part of the family? Yes. Can it cause strife? Yes. But it can also bring a family together, teach the family members to care for someone else as much as they care for themselves, and to learn how to function as a unit, not as just an individual. When you remove those who need this extra help from society, you remove the mortar from society that helps to keep us together as a society. People become more self-centered, too insulated, and have too difficult a time seeing outside of their own interests to understand the needs of the society as a whole. We are seeing some of this now in our political discourse (the inability to compromise on anything for the betterment of America). And lest people focus solely on the cost of caring for those who need the extra help…if we’re going to focus on cost, then why would anyone ever have children? After all, children are extremely expensive, and while there’s a possibility that they may come to live up to the parents’ expectations for a better livelihood than the parents have, there is no guarantee….there is not even a high probability. Caring for the disabled basically gives a double-dose of the lessons that being a parent gives in terms of selflessness, giving, love and sacrifice.

The context of the story was that disabled girls are the most targetted group for sexual abuse, and the debate was about whether they should be de-sexed to avoid pregnancy from that abuse, or whether that is just blatantly the wrong approach.

But on a different note, the reality there is that many families of the more profoundly disabled put them into government funded care. The other thing that hit me is that 20% of the total population of Australia is classified as ‘disabled’ and therefore entitled to some form of government-funded allowance. (If this seems as impossible as it first seemed to me – then, for example, all children with chronic asthma are classified as disabled, as no doubt are many older people with problems from arthritis, and also associated with obesity.) The dilemma for the disability advocates is that having more people classified as disabled gives them more political push, but means there are more people sharing in the tax-payer funded benefits that derive from that.

So, the practical reality is that there are constraints to how many disabled people society can afford to carry, as distasteful as that may be.

there’s a major reason that parents of these people get disturbed by their maturing: they are often targets of sexual abuse by weirdos and the like. additionally, many of them are not sterile, so there’s the issue of them having children. there was a case years ago where the parents of one such teenager wanted to get her sterilized because she was being targeted by sexual predators, but it became a big court case (a public advocate intervened to block this).

I understand your point entirely, although as a parent of an older child, let me tell you once they start eating solid food, the diapers are far more awful to change. Heh.

More generally, however, I think infantilization is much more deeply rooted than you think. I’ve noticed many people get deeply disturbed, for example, when even mildly developmentally disabled people show signs they are hormonally adult. This is the case even if their sexualized behaviors aren’t really particularly disruptive. It’s almost as if the human mind needs to slot everyone in a “conceptual age” – and experiences cognitive dissonance when someone shows a mosaic of childlike and adult traits.

Of course, I also don’t believe in rights in a classic sense anyway. As a non-theist, I don’t believe any rights are inherent. Human feelings of suffering and oppression, however, are essentially universal, and I see no reason why society should not, in a utilitarian fashion, try to minimize these. It seems like the procedures outlined do this.

The one disturbing thing from the article you linked to, however, was the newsgroup for these children’s parents called them “pillow angels.” It makes me wonder if part of the desire isn’t simple ease of care, but to infantalize their child to an even greater degree. Perhaps, even if the desire is in part rooted in self delusion it’s not all bad though, as a more childlike appearance may make other subconsciously provide better care, similar to how infants tend to be offered better levels of care than the very old.