"My point being, do you really think that if treatment for blindness or quadriplegia were reliable and available, after a generation or two there would be a significant amount of people choosing not to obtain such treatment?"
Not to deny the important point you're making about the popularity of disability correction, but my answer is: It depends on whether the choice was being made at birth by the parents.
You see this issue with intersexuality: a lot of parents, when they have children with ambiguous genitalia, choose to have surgery on their child to "correct" the genitalia (sometimes because the doctor insists it's best for the child), and then you get children growing up and realizing that this wasn't actually what they wanted done to them.
One of these days I'll finish a story I planned to write about a world where everyone but a small minority are blind, and the sighted kids are "corrected" at birth by having this strange extra sense removed. Because, you know, when one lives in a world that's designed for blind people (no lights, etc.), those stupid sighted kids are going to be stumbling all the time, because they try to depend on this extra sense they have. It just makes medical sense to eliminate their handicap. :/
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Date: 2010-06-14 01:54 am (UTC)Not to deny the important point you're making about the popularity of disability correction, but my answer is: It depends on whether the choice was being made at birth by the parents.
You see this issue with intersexuality: a lot of parents, when they have children with ambiguous genitalia, choose to have surgery on their child to "correct" the genitalia (sometimes because the doctor insists it's best for the child), and then you get children growing up and realizing that this wasn't actually what they wanted done to them.
One of these days I'll finish a story I planned to write about a world where everyone but a small minority are blind, and the sighted kids are "corrected" at birth by having this strange extra sense removed. Because, you know, when one lives in a world that's designed for blind people (no lights, etc.), those stupid sighted kids are going to be stumbling all the time, because they try to depend on this extra sense they have. It just makes medical sense to eliminate their handicap. :/