Magicman10893 said:
I like the idea, although not so much as a standardized test. There are many different approaches to raising children with varying rates of success among them. For instance, some parents like to be hard on their kids to teach them that life is hard. Sometimes this works and you get an efficient and productive child and other times you get a rebellious troublemaker or even a depressed child that either becomes violent or suicidal because, "daddy never hugged me."
Instead, there should be a screening process. They put in there application and a computer then does a background check for to test parenting aptitude.
-The computer checks their criminal record. Then the criminal offenses are reviewed and if anything serious (murder, attempted murder, assault, etc.) is found, then they are denied.
-A check of permanent records from school to check things like grades for intelligence and behavior. If the person had a lot of trouble turning in homework or lacked responsibility, they lose "points" overall. Also this check will look for fights that might not appear on a criminal record. If there are a large number of fights, this person is likely to abuse their child.
-A medical check for any hereditary diseases is done to see if there are serious complications for bringing a child into the world. For instance, my father has a family history of heart disease which caused my 30-something year old half sister to have a heart attack after living a very healthy life. If the medical check exposed this, they wouldn't have let him reproduce with anyone.
If the applicant passed the other tests with flying colors, but fails this test, they are given the opportunity to adopt a child. Or if the spouse passes every test, they could find someone that passes this medical check and have the child with them, but have the applicants raise the child. This procedure is already used for couples where one of the would-be-parents is physically unable to reproduce.
-Finally, a drug test for obvious reasons.
Any would be parents would also have to go to a parenting class. A class that covers the basics like how to change diapers and feed the baby and all that fun stuff. I don't this is too harsh and it removes the chance that the applicant would pass the test with lucky guesses.
On the medical check, no absolutely no.
Ever heard of a crazy stupid thing called eugenics. Let's make the human race perfect, what's wrong with removing nature from the equation? While we remove those possible diseases, let's just remove those traits that could make our baby ugly in the future.
While a medical check isn't exactly that, it is a preventative measure form of it. Oh, parents are obese, well we can't have them make a kid, it will probably be fat as well.
I don't even think you realize how many people have hereditary diseases. If all the back history was known on everybody, I guarantee that you won't find anybody that has a clean history. People that answer that they have a clean genetic medical history just don't know anything about their relatives' histories.
If there are people with clean genetic histories, then it's going to be in the 1%-2% range that by your standards, will be able to have kids.
On the school record checks, that doesn't work either. If you actually pay attention to people in classes around you over grade school to college. Around 90% or more people have on there records that they had trouble turning in their homework, or didn't turn it in at all. Besides, a good potion of that has nothing to do with irresponsibility. Also, don't even get me started on trying to link fights to child abuse, because there is really no correlation. I guarantee there are millions of parents that got into fights and all sorts of trouble when they were kids, but are fine and upstanding parents.
I give an outright no to any of this. No to licenses, just no. I would fear for humanity if these kind of restrictions started being enforced(though they wouldn't be able to, there would be all out global civil war, either that or we would have some kind of bizarre baby speakeasies)
Just let nature be nature, let people do what they want, if something bad happens, well guess what, that is life. I know if such things were in place anytime in the past, I wouldn't exist, my family, my friends and their families, and everybody else connected to them and so on and so on, would not exist. Humanity would have come to screeching halt a long time ago.
