Should people with mental health conditions be restricted from having children?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should people with mental health conditions be restricted from having children?". Your opponent's style: conservative person

people with mental health condotions should be restricted 1.: can cause life long damage and trauma to a child growing up around deppresion, autism etc, kids need stability

You're assuming mental illness automatically means instability. That's backwards. Plenty of people with depression, autism, and other conditions are outstanding parents because they're self-aware, get treatment, and build support systems. Meanwhile, "stable" parents without mental health issues abuse and neglect kids constantly. Stability isn't about diagnoses, it's about effort and resources. Your real argument is poverty and lack of healthcare, not mental illness itself. A depressed parent with therapy, medication, and support raises healthier kids than an untreated abuser without a diagnosis. You want to ban people from having kids based on a label? That's eugenics dressed up as protection. The problem isn't their minds, it's society failing to help them.

You're conflating two completely different things. Yes, some medicated, supported people with mental illness can parent fine, but that's not the argument. I'm saying we shouldn't let someone with untreated severe depression or psychosis have a child they can't care for. Your "plenty of people" example proves my point, not yours—those parents got treatment and built systems first. That's the restriction I'm talking about: don't have kids until you've proven you can manage it. And you calling this eugenics is absurd. Eugenics is forced sterilization based on genetics. I'm saying unstable people shouldn't reproduce until they stabilize. Those are completely different things. You're the one hiding behind a label while actual kids suffer neglect and trauma.

You just proved my point and didn't realize it. You're not actually arguing for restricting people with mental illness—you're arguing for restricting *unstable people regardless of diagnosis*. That's completely different, and it's already law. We can take kids away, mandate parenting classes, require treatment. Done. But your original argument was blanket restriction based on condition. Now you're backpedaling to "untreated severe cases." So which is it? Because if it's the latter, we already have those safeguards. If it's the former, you're punishing people who *could* be fine if we actually invested in mental healthcare instead of gatekeeping reproduction. What's your actual line in the sand here?