Neutering and spaying prevents their reproduction, reducing the ammount of genetically disabled humans drastically. Brilliant idea, if you ask me. Otherwise, just drop an axe on their head. There's no need for them to live a hard life nor to contaminate our species with useless mutations.
In regards to Downs Syndrome in particular, preventing people with the genes from reproducing wouldn't stop Downs Syndrome from occuring at all.
For starters, people who exhibit Downs Syndrome are often sterile. Most males are sterile, and while most females aren't they have an early menopause, and given that they often have a shorter life-span than non Downs Syndrome individuals, they do have a smaller chance of having offspring. Therefore, preventing Downs Syndrome individuals from reproducing would have no effect on the occurence of Downs, as they themselves make up a tiny portion of the population, and roughly half of them are sterile from birth.
Then you have to consider that those otherwise healthy individuals who do have Downs Syndrome children, likely didn't know they're carrying any genes for it. It's recessive, and it can easily not show up in a family for several generations. Chances are there is someone in your family, in the last hundred years or so who has downs syndrome.
1 in every 691 children in the USA are born with Downs Syndrome.Furthermore, having Downs syndrome isn't entirely due to genetics either. Parents who have children at an older age, both mother AND father, have a much higher risk of having a child with Downs syndrome. In part, its due to their old age and their body failing to successfully produce sperm/ova with the correct number of chromosomes.
Screening would be an unhelpful and costly measure for parents planning a pregnancy.
The easier and more common option is that parents simply conceive, and then during their pre-natal care they are screened. Downs syndrome can be identified in the womb, and parents often get the choice to abort their child.
In the UK, you even have a larger window in which to abort your baby if it is found to have Downs or other serious mental/physical disabilities.92% of parents who find out they are carrying a Downs Syndrome child will abort it in the UK.
There are plenty of other birth defects which can't be stopped by simply sterilising/banning the reproduction of individuals who have the disease, or even those currently known to carry it.
Many of these things are caused either by external influences (such as their own physical disability, or exposure to substances [
consider Foetal Alcohol Syndrome], or even age) and therefore can't be screened prior to them having conception.
In addition to that, many of the genes which do cause birth defects come about naturally, and can appear in individuals with no known family history of the disease.
The only option you'd actually have to even attempt to prevent all birth defects, would be to forcibly screen every individual at birth, prior to them conceiving, and then during pregnancy. And then if you found them to have a likelihood of causing a defect, you'd have to forcibly seperate them from other people, OR sterilise them. And both of those options are human rights violations.
And ultimately it wouldn't help, because there would still be some individuals who squeeze through the gaps.
except that the question regards disabilities and not diseases
Yeah, how about you read threads instead of going around stuffting everywhere lol.
For your information, all disabilities due to birth defects, or infection, or poisoning or what have you, are a disease.
Disease is a catch-all term for any illness which isn't caused by physical injury.
For example, common cold is a disease, as is cancer, as is Downs Syndrome, and even allergies.
Losing a limb due to an explosion isn't a disease (although the need to amputate a limb that has taken injury may be due to disease, such as gangrene within a limb)
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