It's wrong to think of mentally disabled adults as "children". They are not children. They are just "slow" adults -- more naive than the rest of us, more vulnerable to deception and manipulation -- but still adults, with adult bodies, adult longings, adult pleasures.
Let me show you the fallacy of deciding that "normal" people should make major life decisions for "slow" people --
Though I test at the top of the IQ scale, I've had several "slow" friends in my lifetime. You may wonder why a brilliant woman would choose the company of mentally slow people? The answer is obvious, but not very flattering to most folks. It's a matter of scale: to "slow" people, I'm not much smarter than people of normal intelligence, so they treat me the same way they treat everyone else; and to me, "slow" people are not much slower than normal people, so they seem normal enough to me.
In other words, in my world view, nearly all of you are retarded.
(Sorry about that... I don't say it to offend anyone, but merely to make my point.)
So... if everyone is retarded compared to high-IQ people, does that mean that only people with high IQs ought to be allowed to make major life-decisions for themselves? And if that sounds ridiculous, where is the cut-off point?
Do we decide that slow people with an IQ below 100 ought not to make their own decisions?
-- Well, then, half the people in the country can no longer make decisions for themselves.
Where, exactly, do we draw the line?
I submit that if this woman has even the mentally capacity of a six-year-old, that she is "old enough" to know what a baby is and what pain is... and that if she decides she wants to have that baby and endure the pain of labor, she should be allowed to make that decision for herself.
She is mentally disabled, not mentally ill. Furthermore, she isn't mentally disabled due to faulty genetic material, but due to fetal alcohol syndrome -- because her mother drank too much alcohol during pregnancy. So the odds are that the child she carries will be absolutely normal.
The woman herself may in fact be a good mother, although that isn't under debate here. I understand that she has agreed with her parents to give the child up for adoption.
I do think that she and her parents should be allowed to make this decision as they see fit.
-- Paravani
