This is a real situation that I found out about this week.
An eighty-year-old woman has the care of her 18-year-old granddaughter, she raised her. The reason that she has care of her now is because the young woman is, as used to be said, profoundly retarded and her parents aren’t in the picture. The grand daughter’s “IQ”* has been reported to be somewhere around 40. Despite this, the granddaughter is fully mobile and is always in danger of wandering off. It’s impossible for her grandmother, who is, eighty, after all, to keep control of her. There have been some rather troubling signs that someone might be having sex with her. The granddaughter doesn’t understand what sex is but is attracted to men.
The grandmother is afraid of her grand-daughter becoming pregnant and has been trying to arrange for her to be sterilized. The granddaughter has no idea what pregnancy is and is, obviously, unable to take care of a child in any circumstances.
From what she has been told, she has the legal authority to make the decision since her granddaughter can’t. However, she has not been able to find anyone who would be willing to do it and has met with opposition from the social work establishment. She has been told by at least one of them that “She might want to have a baby someday”. Remember, this is a young woman who doesn’t know what pregnancy is and who can’t dress herself unaided. Yet the medical-social-work people pretend that this is something she’ll decide when the only one who actually would be exercising informed choice in the matter is some creep who seduces a woman with the intellectual abilities of a toddler.
So, the grand mother, who doesn’t even know who is going to take care of her grand-daughter when she isn’t around anymore (state programs are drying up completely), has to worry that she could have a baby to take care of within any given year and can not get the medical establishment to act to prevent that.
Anyone want to comment?
* IQ isn’t something I believe in but she seems to me to have the development of a two to three year old from what I’ve seen.