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Is it "child abuse" to have children when you have mental health issues?
Being alive as a conscious creature is already a mental health issue.
What conscious living creature doesn't have a mental health issue, by very definition?
Having said that, should a person who is conscious of his own, say, self-destructive addictions or history of suicidal or criminal violence consciously refrain from having children?
In those cases, well, yes, probably.
As it stands, there are quite enough semi-conscious people in the world having children, probably more so than those at a higher level of consciousness.
There’s the rub. People used to smoke and drink while pregnant… in my family, it was a holiday joke that my brother got hiccups when my mom drank champagne. He was barely 6 lbs.
I was militant about my maternal health - and I had big, giant healthy babies. Never drank or smoked. Depression is hereditary but I raised two successful adults.
Pick your poison. Life isn’t perfect. I’m really impatient with people who think they’re better than others.
Gotta say, the title of this poll is a little offensive. The stigma of mental illness is contrived. Abuse - that’s not contrived when it occurs. And it occurs all too often.
I’m of a mind that everyone has some level of difficulty - some, fully functioning, seek help and get diagnosed and others just… do what they do.
OP, would you say the same about someone having a disability or other chronic health issues? Sometimes things don’t appear until later in life. Their health issues doesn’t stop them from living life they choose to live
I can take almost anyone in the world and point to something about them that makes a good argument for that person to not have children.
Don't let whatever your experience was/is with your mother taint people with mental illness as incompetent.
Eugenics is dangerous.
I absolutely agree with this.
At the same time, I agree with the sentiment of others that there's a kind of reverse eugenics going on. For the last 2 or 3 generations, the less bright and less capable people have been outbreeding the more intelligent and more capable. I don't know what to do about it. But it's a serious problem. And I do believe it's been deliberately engineered that way by the powers that be.
At the same time, I agree with the sentiment of others that there's a kind of reverse eugenics going on. For the last 2 or 3 generations, the less bright and less capable people have been outbreeding the more intelligent and more capable. I don't know what to do about it. But it's a serious problem. And I do believe it's been deliberately engineered that way by the powers that be.
Seems that way. But to what end? To dumb people down so they aren't aware what those powers are doing?
It's not making them more willing to do the crummy jobs, as we're seeing.
If a person can not adequately take care of themselves, mentally, emotionally, physically or financially they should not have children, but I would not consider that child abuse.
If a person can not adequately take care of themselves, mentally, emotionally, physically or financially they should not have children, but I would not consider that child abuse.
You describe someone who is either comatose or Trump*.
My mom had bipolar. It was insane at times. However, she held the same job for 35 years. I don't believe she had any business having any children. My dad should have known better to have children with that woman. He was a good man - athletic, very level-headed and mellow. I (nor my siblings) have bipolar, but I have severe depression (among some other issues, like addiction) and it's not been easy.
My mother was a narcissistic alcoholic with a paranoid streak. She was verbally, mentally and physically abusive. As the only daughter, I took the brunt of it. My father was the perfect enabler. He never confronted her and forbid us kids to say anything. He even told us to not argue with her when she was verbally abusive because it meant that later on she would be screaming at him. As far as I'm concerned, neither of them should have been parents.
When I was 22, my siblings and I discovered we had a half brother. My father had been married before he married our mother. Neither of them was going to tell us we had a half sibling. Their hand was forced when our half brother showed up wanting to meet us all. The half brother was schizophrenic and ended up committing suicide.
As for my brothers and me, between the 3 of us we had 4 kids. All of them have had mental issues to one degree or another.
I consciously worked at being a better parent to my child. Yet, having children is a crapshoot as we never know what will get passed down to them. Still, I very much wanted to be a mother and in the end, I don't regret doing so.
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