05-02-2008, 06:22 PM
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Commentator
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Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Kangaroo Flat, Australia
Age: 24
Posts: 1,144
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Seigi
If you were that horribly disfigured would you regret being born? To put it another way, if tomorrow you were in a horrible accident and your face ended up like that would you kill yourself or keep living? I don’t think having someone not exist is in their best interest even at that point - although if they decide it for themselves its a different issue. There is such a point, comatose and in constant pain would be at or past it, but it isn’t simply being ugly. For best perspective consider what you would put in your living will as it makes the person being considered a primary concern rather than a problem to be solved and moved past (which gives a bias to killing and beign done with).
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I honestly didn't expect this to get so heated. Perhaps I phrased my words wrong, it was not my intention to offend people, simply to ask how severe a deformity must be before you make the decision to abort.
Obviously, we are all going to have varying opinions, and I would like to hear, from those who would continue with a pregnancy, knowing their child would look like Julianna.
Yes, she has a fully functioning brain, so she does have the mental capacity to understand one day that she looks different. She's smart enough to know this, but I question what her future will be like.
Why are parents concerned more with the here and now than the childs future?
Do they make a decision based on what they want?
Do they consider the childs future?
Why would someone give birth to a child they knew would not look 'normal' yet put that same child through literally hundreds of surgeries to make her appear more normal, and more acceptable? I simply don't see the point of putting such a young child through all the pain and trauma of facial and cranial reconstruction. It's not going to be easy for her. I feel more for Julianna than I do for her parents - after all, Julianna is the one undergoing surgery, she is the one who has begun to endure taunts on the school playground, and they will only get worse - have her parents considered what action they will take when it gets out of control?
To answer your question, if I were in an accident, and disfigured, I may well decide I am better off dead - depending on the disfigurement, of course.
If my life would be filled with pain and misery, where society judges me for the way I look, obviously it's going to be very hard for someone to look past that, and appriciate themselves. Maybe you could do it, but I couldn't.
It's a very sad fact. but society does judge us on our looks.
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Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands? ~ Ernest Gaines
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