Aborting a Retarded Fetus Is Better that Giving a Retarded Baby Up for Adoption

By Frank Medlock

Is there a more self-serving and offensive thing a person could possibly do? Tempting to do, of course, rather than give up the rest of your life taking care of a kid whose best outcome is to sort of be able to take care of himself. But there is no greater burden you could possibly put on the rest of society.

Before I go any further, I want to address the readers who are put off by the fact that I am using the word “retarded.” I’m not going to stop using, and there are two reasons. First, it is the most general and descriptive word. Everyone knows what it means and it’s in the DSM-IV because it is the official term for the variety of disabilities. Also, the word is not inherently bad. I don’t care if it has been used in a hateful context. The word itself means that the person’s psychological development was impeded in some way. The development was retarded. The person was retarded. The word makes sense. The word “nigger” was invented to express disdain. The word “faggot” was adopted from the idea that gays should be burned to death. Those are inherently hateful words. Whatever hate is in the word “retarded” is just a reflection of social reality. If you come up with a new word to replace it without changing the fact that retarded people are looked down on socially, then that word will eventually be considered hateful too. “Nigger” was replaced by “negro” when blacks were still extremely marginalized, so that word eventually became perceived as hateful. If you replace “retarded” with “developmentally disabled,” middle school kids are still going to use it to make fun of each other, and activists will eventually get pissed off that the word is being used. Then we’ll have to find another new word, which I would say is pretty retarded.

But back to the point, there are definitely arguments for why you should be able to give up a retarded baby for adoption. On one hand, it’s kind of hard not to be sympathetic. I mean, all we hear about is how having kids changes your life and how every parent’s life revolves around his or her kids, but there’s a pretty big step up from going to soccer games or piano recitals and wiping your 22 year-old’s ass for the fourth time of the day. Maybe the worst part would be the period before the child is born but after you have found out that the baby is going to be retarded. Anticipating the misery that is to come would be atrocious. Well, I guess that’s not the worst part. The worst part is still having to spend every free minute trying to prevent your retarded kid from causing a total disaster. I admit that when you’re staring down the barrel of that gun, it would be hard to avoid pulling the adoption trigger.

On the other hand, the decision to give up the retarded baby for adoption is basically saying, “Hey, my life is too important to be disrupted by taking care of a retarded baby.” Maybe you could delude yourself into thinking that someone else wants to take care of the baby, but that is a lie. Nobody affirmatively wants to take care of a retarded baby; people just have an appropriate sense of responsibility not to throw that job on the government or some random person. They know that it is arrogant and self-centered beyond belief to think that someone else should have the completely thankless job. Believing that someone really wants to raise the retarded child is like thinking that people like picking up their dogs’ shit. Nobody likes it; you just do it because it would be fucked up to leave it for someone else to do.

Giving up a retarded kid for adoption would probably destroy the rest of your life. How could you ever feel good about yourself after doing something like that? You wouldn’t donate money to charity, because it’s not like you’re ever going to get back on the positive side of that ledger. You might still have friends, but you would always know that the friends probably look down on you for being a selfish prick, and they’d constantly worry that you’re going to pass off some responsibility on them instead of taking care of your own business. Anything you ever did would be under a dark cloud of guilt, knowing that the fun you’re having is only possible because you completely dicked over someone else who is probably spending that time reassembling a book case that your biological child tore apart for no apparent reason.

There is an obvious solution here, but you probably don’t want to hear it. When you weigh all of the options, you pretty much have to abort the fetus that is going to become a retarded baby. Think about the other possibilities. If you keep the baby, you will ruin your entire life. You are taking on a responsibility that will take up all of your time, and will not be remotely enjoyable. What you now think of as a horrible day will become a pretty good day, and there won’t be anything better. If you give the baby up for adoption, you will be annihilated by guilt for the rest of your life, and that feeling will be justified. You will have taken all of that evil I just described and passed it onto someone else. From a net social value standpoint, it’s even worse than keeping it because there is one life ruined by responsibility and another ruined by guilt. However you feel about abortion, you have to admit that it’s the socially optimal outcome. The only way to deny that argument is to say that someone would actually derive happiness from raising a retarded child, and I already explained why making that argument proves that you are a self-centered jerk.