Quote:
Originally Posted by Thomas Anderson
Question 1:
If you knew a woman who was pregnant, who had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis, would you recommend that she have an abortion? Read the next question before looking at the response for this one.
And, by the way, on your answer to the abortion question: If you said YES, you just killed Beethoven.
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This is the great Beethoven fallacy and there's so many things wrong about it it's hard to know where to begin.
First of all Beethoven did not have eight older siblings. He had one older sister who died in infancy, which was common in those days. She was neither deaf, nor dumb, nor blind, nor mentally retarded. There is also no evidence that either of his parents had syphilis, although his mother did die of TB, again not uncommon for that time.
This is simply a fabricated lie purposely spread by people with a vested interest in spreading it. But that is beside the point because it's a ridiculous argument anyway. Unless the author of this lie is trying to argue that there is some causal link between a tubercular mother and a syphilitic father and giving birth to a musical genius the world is no more likely to be deprived of a Beethoven by an abortion then we would be by any two people refusing to have sex.
It's an unanswerable argument and Rohl Dahl turned the argument back on the author very nicely when he wrote about an equally fortuitous decision not to have an abortion in 1888 which gave us Adolf Hitler.