Cutting out your kids eyes is not comparable to cutting off a quarter cm of a completely pointless flap of skin. |
Yes it is. Semitic cultures see the foreskin as useless or even harmful. Those blind parents see eyesight the same way. You really need to meditate on what it would be like to be blind, to be a member of the blind community, to perceive the world exclusively through your other senses, which then become strengthened... and to have a child that is completely different from you from birth, who would have a very hard time understanding why his mommy and daddy don't see the world as s\he does... Many blind people want to have blind children, or none at all!
By outlawing this procedure, you will discourage millions of first-world blind people from reproducing. Like I've said before, who are you to say that non-life is better than blindness?!
Parents are referred to as guardians and custodians for a reason. |
Yes - because mommy government wants them to do all the hard work of birthing and raising the next generation of its subjects without giving them their natural rights as parents.
Libman - how far do parents' rights go? |
Radical blindism / deafism is the most controversial example I can think of, and I can't seem to find any examples of it in real life (yet), but plenty in science fiction
(ex). More common examples of the extremes of parents' rights include prenatal genetic engineering, denying medical treatment for religious reasons, sex change operations, corporal punishment, and so on. The limits are set by the child's rights to life and emancipation - parents may not do anything that poses a substantial (say p>0.1) risk of death or risk of losing one's ability to be emancipated (loss of mental faculties and ability to communicate).
What about those people who are born with no skin, should they be allowed to flay their children? |
I don't think this issue is comparable. Very few babies are born with missing skin, and those that survive have the missing skin grafted on in the first few months, after which they go on to live very normal lives. They don't go to a special school with other born-with-some-skin-missing kids, etc. People who are blind constitute a very different culture, they perceive the world very differently than everyone else.