Parental Autonomy versus the Rights of Children to Enablement
J. Hughes
2013-07-25 00:00:00

Placing legal obligations on parents to treat is a rich biopolitical topic since it touches on attitudes about the rights of parents versus the society's obligation to ensure good lives for children despite parental malfeasance. It also tests our attitudes about which abilities and conditions are sufficiently important to create a legal obligation rather than just relying on social pressure and education, or encouraging a treatment through subsidies and tax breaks.

Overall the highest support (87%) was for a legal obligation to treat severe cognitive impairment and cerebral palsy, followed by blindness and deafness. Obligation to treat ADD garnered the least support (58%).





When I ran regression models on the predictors of support for the interventions five factors were significant:





- Older respondents supported the obligations to treat more than younger ones.

- Transhumanists supported the obligations to treat more than non-transhumanists.

- People who agreed that society should do more to treat mental illness more strongly supported obligations.

- Libertarians were less likely to support the obligations to treat than non-libertarians, presumably on the grounds that libertarians don't like legal obligations.

- Men supported the legal obligations more than the non-men (sorry, not enough non-men to break it out more than that, although now I have a Devo track of "Are we non-men" running in my head).
What was also notable was that support for neither disability rights nor reproductive rights were significant predictors of the desire to oblige parents to fix disabilities.

We can see here that the biggest differences by age were on fixing ADD; only half of young adults wanted parents to be obliged to fix ADD, compared to three quarters of folks over sixty.





There was also a significant difference between technoprogressives on this dimension vis-a-vis the non-progressive transhumanists and the Left non-transhumanists. The technoprogressives supported a legal obligation to fix disabilities more than the non-progressive transhumanists (some of whom are libertarians), and transhumanists were more in favor than the Left non-transhumanists (some of whom probably were influenced by extreme disability rights arguments against fixing disabilities in general).