I thought this essay was beautifully written and I agreed with almost every point he made. I think he did a great job of addressing some of the major objections to this idea, and for that I agree with the idea even more. Particularly, I liked the way he related the licensing of parents to how we regulate drivers licenses and the tests needed to be taken to become a doctor or lawyer. In society, we expect people to be competent and capable of performing surgery or driving a car, because if they hold the license to do so, we can trust them, to some degree. Granted there are some mistakes that can be made as LaFollette points out, but generally if you go to a licensed doctor, you can feel confident in his abilities to work on you. Therefore, I completely agree that if two people, or even one person, wishes to become a parent, they should prove their competence, abilities, and intentions before being able to conceive or take their child home from the hospital. If we make adoptive parents jump through hoops to get a child that they desperately want and will most likely accurately rear, why do we let incompetent, violent, selfish people take home children that they may not even want or take care of. I think it is ridiculous to wait for a child to be abused for 10 years of its life, until a school nurse sees their bruises, before the child is taken away and put in a foster home to maybe never be adopted, since they are no longer a cute adorable baby. If this child’s parents “failed” the test in the first place because they showed they were not capable of rearing the child “correctly” or showed potential harm to the child; that child could have been taken away and placed into a foster home on day one, been adopted within a few months, and had a wonderful life full of love, with committed, competent parents.
The only objection I have that I feel he didn’t address is when should these people have to be tested? Should it be right at puberty when they are biologically capable of having children? Because if that is the case, then these children will most likely fail since they surely aren’t ready to raise children. However if you wait until a person is pregnant to test them, if they fail what do you do with the child (he somewhat addressed this). And if you wait until they are older but not pregnant yet, say early 20’s and they fail, should you put them on birth control, or just tell them they shouldn’t have sex? It gets a little fuzzy with these technicalities because there doesn’t seem to be a healthy way to prevent people from becoming pregnant that fail the test. And it would be traumatic to give someone a test after they give birth or are pregnant because say the woman fails the parenting test in her 4th month of pregnancy, will she have to finish carrying her baby, only to have it taken from her on the day it is born? I think this would cause major problems and I think foster homes would be bombarded with these children of unfit parents. So, I think the best, yet not the healthiest, way to prevent pregnancies from people that fail the tests is that they should have to get on birth control, for say a year, until they can retake the test and try again. However, this is only controlling the women, what do we do with the men that show to be potentially unfit fathers? Put him in some type of male chastity belt, or make him use some kind of spemicide? These ideas seem a little far-fetched but in general I think the listening of parents should definitely be implemented in some way and I think the government should begin working on the glitches and work out all of the technicalities so we can administer these tests as soon as possible. There are too many unfit parents out there screwing up their kids, we need this test!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
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