Having problem children neutered?

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No, the lack of it being listed isn't a grounds for rejecting it, as established in the 10th Amendment. And compulsory castration is very problematic for a number of reasons.

That would be the 9th amendment.

ruveyn

My reasoning is simple: what works with animals could help calm children who have similar problems. Although this would damage their ability to reproduce later in life, I think that it would constitute an overall improvement in the quality of life for individuals who may otherwise have led troubled, difficult lives. Furthermore, adoption is a perfectly viable option if they ever wished to rear families. We defend having our pets neutered based on similar premises, after all, and I agree with them. I also think that it is a service to society as a whole to reproductively incapacitate individuals who are often difficult to get along with and, quite frankly, potentially dangerous. Although I wouldn't expect the solution to be immediately popular, I would expect it to start gaining ground quickly if it were proven effective. I think, at the very least, we should be open to the idea.

If an individual has been violently assaulting others, though, then other children should be somehow sheltered from such attacks.

Stating a controversial opinion and defending it is NOT TROLLING.

thisisjusthowitalk, why on earth do you think neutering children will do anything other than harm them and render them unable to reproduce?

I doubt anything of the sort would be done to you if you were obviously very distressed over the idea. Personally, I would have agreed to it at that age. I rejected my sexual impulses out of hand. I found them disturbing. I felt very violated. Even now, I would accept a medication that could somewhat lower my sex drive because, to be perfectly frank, it interferes badly with my studies. Is this concept alien to you?

My reasoning is simple: what works with animals could help calm children who have similar problems. Although this would damage their ability to reproduce later in life, I think that it would constitute an overall improvement in the quality of life for individuals who may otherwise have led troubled, difficult lives. Furthermore, adoption is a perfectly viable option if they ever wished to rear families. We defend having our pets neutered based on similar premises, after all, and I agree with them. I also think that it is a service to society as a whole to reproductively incapacitate individuals who are often difficult to get along with and, quite frankly, potentially dangerous. Although I wouldn't expect the solution to be immediately popular, I would expect it to start gaining ground quickly if it were proven effective. I think, at the very least, we should be open to the idea.

1. Pets are property. Children (either yours or someone else's children) are not property.

3. We are ALL potentially dangerous, every last one of us. Do you propose to neuter the entire human race?

I wanted to have a hystorectomy when I started my first period at twelve. I'm 23 and STILL want one. We never had to give our spayed dogs arficical horomones but then maybe dogs and people are diffrent. I'd still rather take artifical hormones than have to break out where the sun don't shine because I have alergic reactions to the feminine products. Most of these low functning autistics are never going to have a sexual relatioship, let alone children. If it helps them and if they can consent, I think it might be something to be considered. But then I don't think male humans have problems like periods and don't have to use painful products for the convience of others and I can see it being used as an excuse for eugenics. Animals are "fixed" because a lack of responsibility and to make it easier for their owners to handle them. We only had our female chihuahua spayed because her heat cycles were so tough on her. Perhaps giving hystorectomies to female autistics who have a really rough time with periods and do not really plan to have children might be something to consider.

There is a reason why hysterectomies are only done on humans when there is a medical need. Hysterectomy means losing the health benefits of estrogen, mainly on the cardiovascular and skeletal system. You lose a lot more than periods. You lose one of the major protectors women have against heart attacks and osteoporosis. You can take artificial estrogen (and lots of women do when they've had a hysterectomy for medical reasons) but that comes with an increased risk of cancer.

All in all, it's best to leave the reproductive system intact if at all possible. Reproductive hormones are for more than just reproduction.

Designer duds. Designer pets. Designer cripples and ret*ds.

Is that how the world ultimately will see the work of a group of American doctors who treated a 6-year-old with mental and physical disabilities with hormones and surgery? Their point was to arrest her growth so she remains the little "pillow angel" extolled on her parents' website.

"We call her our `Pillow Angel' since she is so sweet and stays right where we place her – usually on a pillow," they gush on the site they started after the Los Angeles Times publicized a story previously known only to readers of the October 2006 issue of the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. (ashley treatment.spaces.live.com/blog/ )

Pillow angel. So sweet. Stays right where we place her.

And you thought the terms "cripples" and "ret*ds" were offensive.

Dolls are sweet. Designer dogs are sweet. They look great on pillows or tucked under the arms of their owners, especially if they don't yap too much. Definitely portable, able to be included in all activities. Welcome at the dinner table.

Which brings us back to how Ashley's parents – specifically, her mother, we learn through the website – came up with the idea of limiting their daughter's size.

Diagnosed with a severe type of brain damage, Ashley "cannot keep her head up, roll or change her sleeping position, hold a toy, or sit up by herself, let alone walk or talk," they tell us. "She is tube-fed...."

Already, at 6, she is reaching the limit of weight that family members say they can handle. Since they want to continue to care for Ashley at home, they discuss a plan with doctors at Seattle's Children's Hospital.

On May 5, 2004, they get the green light from the hospital's 40-member ethics committee to proceed with what they call "the Ashley treatment."

They decide – and the decision was "not a difficult one" – that "Ashley will be a lot more physically comfortable free of menstrual cramps, free of the discomfort associated with large and fully developed breasts, and with a smaller, lighter body that is better suited to constant lying down and is easier to be moved around."

Thus, over the next 2 1/2 years, doctors remove her womb, extract the tiny knots of tissue that would otherwise grow into breasts, take out her appendix for good measure and start giving her large doses of estrogen.

"We certainly do not feel defensive about it," Ashley's parents write in a seemingly interminable description of each and every thought and procedure.

They discuss the support they've had from around the globe, offer links to the hundreds of news stories about them and lament the "misinterpretation" of their motives in the media. Like the specialist who convened the hospital ethics committee, they seem surprised that their story would enrage so many people in the so-called disability community or attract such enduring public attention.

"You cannot attribute bad motives to these parents," Dr. Douglas Diekema said in a lengthy and thoughtful telephone interview this week.

And "No, we did not do this just because we could," he added emphatically in response to an observation about the mistrust with which medical treatments are regarded by people who feel they do not need to be "fixed" because they are not broken. "That is not what drove this."

He is surprised at the degree of interest outside the medical community.

"The hardest part is to see how at odds the disability community is from parents," says Diekema, who hears about their reaction first-hand from his brother, who was disabled in an accident.

"There's a real disconnect. The hard question is: are people with disabilities any better advocates for Ashley than her parents?"

Not necessarily. But their voices are compelling.

"Parents have to be able to make decisions; the question is what limits should there be," says South Carolina civil rights lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson, who has written extensively about her own journey as a self-described "jumble of bones in a bag of skin."

Ashley's parents say theirs wasn't a hard decision "but it should have been," Johnson says. "The question is: are we smart enough to make protocols that work?

"Their statements say this is not about convenience but it really is about ease for the caregiver....

"It looks to me as if they lacked imagination or were afraid of the next step," she says, referring to solutions that improve mobility for adults with disabilities.

As for their decision to surgically stop their daughter's breasts from developing, partly because it would sexualize her, "surely we ought instead to be focusing on forbidding abuse."

Ashley's parents are operating on "the theory of indirect benefit," says Dick Sobsey, director of the University of Alberta's health ethics centre.

In effect, they argue that because her small stature will make it easier for them, the quality of her life will improve because they will be happier, Sobsey notes.

But he questions whether medical and surgical interventions with risk to someone with intellectual disabilities can ever be justified "when the most direct benefits accrue to others?"

Taken to extremes, in some parts of the world, a family might cut off the leg of a child who is already disabled to make him a more effective beggar, Sobsey says. "The argument is that the child who is disabled won't really need the limb and the whole family, including the child, will gain.

"But the theory that people who are already disadvantaged have less to lose doesn't hold. If you rob a small amount from a poor person, you could be taking all they have."

In an editorial on "the Ashley treatment" in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, Jeffrey Brosco of the University of Miami argued: "If we as a society want to revise the nature of the harrowing predicament that (the parents of children with disabilities) face, then more funds for home-based services, not more medication, is what is called for."

Well said.




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