The job might have made me the pariah to make the thread work. It's vasectomy as part of a plea deal for a career criminal who already has like 8 kids? I won't be losing any sleep over it.
Is this a cry for help heebie? Are you looking for someone to send a reminder to Jammies that it is time to tie the knots?
castration:vasectomy::patent:trademark?
I'm pretty much in the gswift camp. Let him put up some frozen spooge at the sperm bank if he's keen on future kids. Raising a few obstacles to further procreation by someone who's clearly not responsible and who has already reproduced does not seem to me of a piece with sterilizing everyone deemed unfit. The guy already has 8 kids. His shitty legacy is secure.
It seems wrong to me.
I wonder how much mileage they get on the legal wrongness of it by being part of a plea deal rather than part of a sentence.
To me, it's the same argument as the death penalty: I'm not particularly troubled by a true shithead being executed or sterilized, but I do not whatsoever trust the government to be evaluating and determining who is a true shithead.
5: Plea deal shouldn't be a factor, I don't think. We wouldn't offer people a chance to take 50 lashes instead of a year in jail, nor should we.
6: That's pretty much where I am, including the analogy to the death penalty. I'm reasonably comfortable thinking that there are some people who should be killed, or who should be prevented from having children. I am violently opposed to any actual system I have ever heard of for determining when this should happen, and I really don't think there's any way to overcome my objections in practice.
People get offered things in lieu of jail all the time. The entire basis for drug court programs is to try and do something to address the behavior like rehab rather than simply lock someone up. If part this guy's drain on society is to run around fathering kids he has no intention or inclination of supporting then offering something to address that instead of jail is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
If this were offered within a context of a rehab program, it would have a very different connotation.
9: So are you down with the 50 lashes, too?
What other burdens on society should be ameliorated in court actions for unrelated crimes?
Nice pariah-ing, by the way.
Not that 9 is making that claim. Just that there are ways to get people sterilized that still give them freedom to make the ultimate decision in a noncoercive setting.
5. Turing made a plea deal too. It's still wrong. And look what happened to Turing afterwards.
What other burdens on society should be ameliorated in court actions for unrelated crimes?
One of his charges was endangerment of a child, so probably not unrelated.
And no to the fifty lashes. But I would favor offering this kind of thing to female offenders as well but with an IUD or something, not tubes being tied. I'd do it with cash offers as well for the junkies. Round up a bunch of your chronic offenders and offer them 500 bucks cash to get on long term birth control.
14: Unrelated. He didn't endanger the child by fathering it, and ceasing to father children has no connection to whether he would endanger children in the future.
15: Presumably you'd have to offer rich junkies a lot more.
If he already has 8 kids, he may have requested the vasectomy. That may have been a concession on the state's part. "Fine, we'll pay for a vasectomy, but then you're getting 20 months, not 18." "Deal. 20 months and you throw in a vasectomy."
16.1: I'm pretty sure I know a few families where simply being born into them is a hazard.
17: I'm trying to keep the program efficient.
The fuck? 18 was me, and I swear my name was there before I hit post, and then it disappeared. No idea why.
Reproductive freedom isn't just for women.
Freedom is just another word for having a commutable vas deferens.
On which subject, consider what this would feel like if it were tubal ligation rather than vasectomy.
23: It's part of a plea deal, he's going to be losing freedom, it's just a matter of how. If the state offered a woman with eight kids a tubal ligation to get out of some jail time I similarly would not care.
I don't think I'd feel particularly different about it if it were a tubal ligation. Firing off babbies gattling gun style right into the social safety net ought to be deprecated regardless of who does it.
See, I got pilloried a while back when I talked about this, and I came around.
Just because odd things can be imposed in plea deals doesn't mean anything is possible. A plea deal doesn't let you sever a hand, for example, no matter how much mischief someone might have been up to with it. I would say reproduction is among the things basic to human existence that should not be subject to legal constraint.
And, togolosh, "firing off babbies gattling gun style right into the social safety net" is Gingrichian. Very inaccurate and derogatory concept of how people behave.
And even if you don't agree in principle, you should agree with 6/8: as long as there remains the slightest racial/economic inequity in the legal system, it is guaranteed to be applied unjustly, and not worth considering.
I don't think I'd feel particularly different about it if it were a tubal ligation
Oh, come on. There is a vas deferens between tubal ligation and vasectomy.
Very inaccurate and derogatory concept of how people behave.
Sometimes it's not inaccurate and this is probably one of those times.
I would say reproduction is among the things basic to human existence that should not be subject to legal constraint.
I guess in this type of instance where we're already taking a guy's freedom then I don't see the big deal. He's getting out of jail in exchange for limiting himself to "only" eight kids.
26.last: I don't support limiting aid to support the kids (my preference is that it be more generous), who are completely innocent in all this. That's why providing incentives to the parents to get their damn genitals under control appeals to me.
Basically, many prisons are effectively torture camps and any way to shorten the time someone spends in prison without losing the deterrent effect or compromising public safety is a good thing.
No real opinion about whether punishment by vasectomy is morally abhorrent - but I'm fairly sure certain imprisonments are morally abhorrent.
Supermax confinement strikes me as close to torture. I assume that's not what the dude in the OP was facing.
Wouldn't this be a great tattoo? Well, maybe two great tattoos. The relevance here is, um, mastectomies. Oh, I thought you said mastectomy.
That link seems broken. This?
Gingrichian seems like the right description. By all means, donate to one of the many charities devoted to bribing the poors to get sterilized, but keep the government out of making reproductive decisions for the undesirables.
Yeah, I dunno, obvs. from a reproductive freedom standpoint, I don't think this is right. At the same time, I'm pretty much okay with bribing people to limit their reproductivity, given the way we bribe people to do all kinds of other things in this society. I've got some cousins who, while hardly monstrous, should probably quit producing more children post haste. If I could bribe them to do that, I would.
Even doing something like this on a voluntary basis was seen as pretty squicky.
Helpy, you seem like the right person to weigh in on this.
I'd say pretty squicky. This specific case doesn't bother me so much, but when one looks at all of the problems with the rest of the justice system, it seems reasonable that someone might choose sterilization instead of risking an unreasonable jail sentence, and the potential for abuse seems to me to be pretty high.
Unsurprisingly, I'm opposed. I get so many comments about how many kids people assume the girls' moms must have. (Weirdly, the dads don't come in for this kind of treatment much.) I want their parents to not have more kids until they're in a position to parent successfully, but coerced sterilization doesn't seem like a good way to get there.
Thorn, slightly OT, but the guardian has an article today about a tv special hosted by Lorraine Pascale, re her own experience in the UK foster system and she also speaks with a boy and his foster carer. It sounded from the article like a very good program not overrun by maudlin or sensational impulses. I wish I could imagine something of similar restraint and sensitivity on US television, as truly foster care is a subject most prefer to never think about but what sn important service for any society. I would include a link but am on funny phone that won't let me copy URLs but should be easy to find by searching. The program may be viewable online.
On the thread's subject, coming from a family that only a few generations back was the explicit target of this kind of policy I am opposed. LB articulates the intellectual case very well, I'd only add that sure as sin the criteria of any era will change...
Thanks, found it! US foster care news tends to be exploitative and overblown, whatever the message. (There's also a lot of pushback here to the term "foster carers" that's standard in the UK, even though it's a lot less threatening for the actual children in care than "parents" often is.) I do think one thing the US does right is to allow children to be adopted into their foster families, which means one less move, whereas many areas in the UK require families to either foster or adopt without overlap. There are certainly problems when foster families hoping to adopt sabotage reunification plans or otherwise make things harder on the children, but my guess is still that on the whole the benefits of stability outweigh those downsides.
The bit about the working class couple giving her up to the middle class couple was heartbreaking - also, enraging, but I'm on holiday so trying to take it easy.
Just saw a large hand-lettered billboard on top of a building as pulled into Birmingham station advertising the regular gig of what seems to be an Earth, Wind and Fire tribute band. Can this wonderousness be true?!?!!
