Post 1: Trite criticisms of a Washington Post essay.
Whenever I am out with Margaret, I’m conscious that she represents a group whose ranks are shrinking because of the wide availability of prenatal testing and abortion. I don’t know how many pregnancies are terminated because of prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome, but some studies estimate 80 to 90 percent.
Imagine. As Margaret bounces through life, especially out here in the land of the perfect body, I see the way people look at her: curious, surprised, sometimes wary, occasionally disapproving or alarmed. I know that most women of childbearing age that we may encounter have judged her and her cohort, and have found their lives to be not worth living. […]
What I don’t understand is how we as a society can tacitly write off a whole group of people as having no value. I’d like to think that it’s time to put that particular piece of baggage on the table and talk about it, but I’m not optimistic. People want what they want: a perfect baby, a perfect life. To which I say: Good luck. Or maybe, dream on.
And here’s one more piece of un-discussable baggage: This question is a small but nonetheless significant part of what’s driving the abortion discussion in this country. I have to think that there are many pro-choicers who, while paying obeisance to the rights of people with disabilities, want at the same time to preserve their right to ensure that no one with disabilities will be born into their own families. The abortion debate is not just about a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby; it’s also about a woman’s right to choose which baby she wants to have.
There’s a lot to unpack in this article:
1) Bauer is, I think, correct to believe the lives of people with Down Syndrome are worth as much as other lives. Objectively, having Down doesn’t make life less rich or worthwhile, nor does it make loving and being loved less rewarding.
2) Bauer’s essay is marred by her habit of attributing unflattering beliefs to large groups of people, based on dubious reasoning. For example, she writes “I know that most women of childbearing age that we may encounter have judged her and her cohort, and have found their lives to be not worth living.” Huh? Even among the tiny minority of women of childbearing age who aborted a fetus with Down Syndrome, it’s unfair to assume that they consider people with Down Syndrome to be leading lives not worth living; there are obvious other reasons they might have chosen an abortion (for instance, not believing that they personally had the ability or the resources to care for a child with Down Syndrome).
(Baggage Carousel 4 has further discussion of this point – including dubious speculation about Bauer’s motives. Holy Irony, Batman!)
3) Whatever Washington Post editor edited this sentence:
I don’t know how many pregnancies are terminated because of prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome, but some studies estimate 80 to 90 percent.
should be sentenced to several months of editing Judith Butler’s essays for readability. It’s impossible that 80 to 90 percent of pregnancies are aborted because of Down syndrome, which only occurs in 1 in every 800-1000 pregnancies. Presumably, the author means that 80 to 90 percent of fetuses with Down Syndrome are aborted.
Post 2: Responses to Pro-Life Responses to Bauer
1) Predictably, many pro-life bloggers have been linking to this piece, some comparing the abortion of disabled fetuses to the Holocaust or genocide. It seems to me that this argument begs the question, when applied to the abortion debate. Deliberately killing thousands of people with Down Syndrome would be genocide, beyond any doubt. But calling the abortion of Down Syndrome fetuses “genocide” assumes that fetuses are people. Whether or not fetuses are people is one of the primary questions pro-choicers and pro-lifers disagree on; you can’t just assume it’s true and then accuse pro-choicers of genocide.
Even pro-life responses that aren’t extreme enough to compare pro-choicers to Nazis tend to make this same basic logical error of assuming what’s at issue.
2) Also on the abortion question, even if we agree that abortion in order to prevent Down syndrome is wrong, and even if we agree that government intervention is called for (two very big ifs), that still doesn’t lead to banning abortion. It would be less extreme to simply ban testing for Down syndrome.
3) If there were a prenatal test for potential obesity, I have no doubt – none whatsoever – that the large majority of expectant mothers in the U.S. would take the test, and would abort any fetus which was likely to become obese. People like me would virtually cease to exist. I’ve been thinking about this hypothetical all day, and although I believe it’s true – given the choice, most mothers would abort a fetus if they knew it would someday look like me – that doesn’t alter my views on whether abortion or prenatal testing should be legal. If the options are limiting women’s reproductive rights or limiting the births of people like me, the latter is the lesser evil.
4) Speaking only for myself, if I were a pregnant woman, told that my fetus had Down syndrome, I believe I’d choose to abort. People with Down syndrome are significantly more likely to die young (Down syndrome is associated with severe heart conditions). My cousin died at age sixteen, in a car accident. My cousin was wonderful and her life well-worth living and all her family and friends are blessed because we were lucky enough to know her; but it would have been better still, immeasurably, had she lived decades longer.
Worldview Warrior disagrees with my approach.
That is reality… you want a perfect baby? Sorry to break it to you, it won’t happen. This desire for perfection is a fundamental longer for the way things ought to be but the means by which we try to obtain perfection in our fallenness is flawed.
I agree that life comes sans guarantee. Some born with terrible heart conditions defy doctor’s expectations by living to 90; some in perfect health die young in stupid car accidents. But even though I can’t control what happens, what’s wrong with trying to improve the odds?
Post 3: Separating the Issues of Down Syndrome and Abortion
Imagine it is discovered that dumping folic acid into the water supply cuts Down syndrome births by 80%. Some areas begin putting folic acid into the water (similar to the way some areas have reduced cavities by putting fluoride in drinking water). Hypothetically, let’s assume that this has no side effects.
How many people would object to an 80% reduction in Down syndrome births, if it didn’t involve abortion? From this pro-choicers perspective, there’s no logical distinction between a reduction in Down syndrome births due to a “cure” and a reduction due to voluntary selective abortion. So if someone is appalled by the latter, but okay with the former, that suggests that they’re not really against Down syndrome being wiped out; they’re just anti-abortion.
Post 4: Is Preventing Down Syndrome Ethical?
Suppose that in the future, scientists discover that trisomy 21 – the condition that leads to Down syndrome – is indirectly caused by a virus which effects one in every 1000 or so births. A program of inoculation wipes out the virus, and Down syndrome in the following generations no one is born with Down syndrome, ever.
Is this genocide? Or a boon to humanity?
I don’t know.
The argument that attempting to prevent disability, is the same as saying disabled people are worthless and should be wiped out, compels but does not persuade me. When I say I’d like to wipe out poverty in my lifetime, that’s not saying that I’ve judged poor people’s lives and found them “not worth living.” If I invent a car seat which better protects spines, so fewer are crippled in accidents, that doesn’t mean I’ve judged the lives of people in wheelchairs not worth living.
Everyone faces limits – but a person with Down syndrome, or a person in a wheelchair, faces limits most of us never experience. If fewer people face those limits, how is that terrible?
On the other hand, that argument ignores the very real prejudice against the disabled. What if the energy put into “curing” disability was instead put into fighting against anti-disabled bigotry? The Useless Tree argues that instead of seeking to ban abortion, we should instead solve the problem of selective abortion of disabled fetuses by increasing understanding (hat tip: 11D):
…We should think of ways to allow people, and especially prospective parents, to see the beauty of children with disabilities. And the first way to do that is to put more resources and attention into supporting families with disabled children.
If securing needed therapies and programs for disabled children in schools was less of a struggle and more of a welcoming and constructive process, then some of the stigma of disability might disappear. If there were more healthy and happy group-living accommodations for adults with disabilities, adults whose parents have passed away, then new parents with disable children would worry less about what the future might hold. If there were as much emphasis in our culture on common humanity as there was on individual productivity (I am, you will remember, against productivity), then there would be less questioning the value or worth of disabled people.
I agree with all that. It is impossible that disability will ever be completely eliminated; even if Down syndrome is wiped out, people will still be born with other disabilities, or become disabled after birth. Since disability can never be “cured,” it logically follows that a genuinely accessible, non-bigoted society is a better and more comprehensive solution to the “problem” of disability.
But doesn’t putting it that way assume that we face an either-or question? The truth is, “both/and” is the most realistic path. We can assume that efforts to reduce disability are good, and still believe that disabled lives are as rich, fulfilling, and worthwhile as the lives of (temporarily) ablebodied people.
But wait a moment – that makes no sense. If “disabled lives are just as rich, fulfilling, and worthwhile,” then isn’t it an enormous waste of money and effort to attempt to prevent or cure disability?
And round and round I go.
Post 5: Is It a Disability to Have a Disability?
Some people find that painting, comics, and beautiful sights immeasurably enrich their lives; some people aren’t all that touched by that stuff. But no blind person gets the chance to find out if they feel rapture when reading a great comic book.
I realize that many blind people lead full lives, and that there’s as much pleasure to be found in the other four senses as there is in sight. I certainly don’t think a blind person’s life is not worth living. But the world is better when everyone has as many options as possible, and blind people are cut off from many options that they might (or might not) have enjoyed. Nonblind, their choices are broadened.
But then again… everyone faces constraints on their options – it’s part of the human condition. And everyone (well, everyone who doesn’t face direly constraining injustice) faces more options than they’ll ever pursue. If I had been born blind, I wouldn’t love comics; but I would have pursued other interests. Life is short, and possibilities are infinite.
Post 6: Diversity vs. Medicine
Meanwhile, our futurists sigh in ecstasy at the thought “seizing control of human evolution” and making “better” babies enhanced for increased intelligence, beauty, or longevity. Yet, developmentally disabled people are some of the most “human” people I have ever met, most merely wanting to belong, contribute, love, and be loved. Somehow that point is lost on the Brave New Worlders, as is the very concept of unconditional love for children regardless of “characteristics.”
We are told by “transhumanists” and others that the future will be an individualist’s paradise, with all of us able to remake ourselves and our children into whatever form of life we choose. But the reverse seems true. As we claim to believe in diversity, in many ways we are actually well down the path to destroying it.
Isn’t a more diverse society richer? In this sense, isn’t a society with less blind people, less Down syndrome people, less fat people, etc., simply less interesting and worthwhile?
I’ve always admired Deaf culture – its beautiful and efficient language, its arts, its ability to survive in a larger and too-often hostile culture. But Deaf culture is shrinking as medical science advances, both because fewer and fewer deaf children are born and because incurable deafness is becoming rarer. I can’t say that I think medical advances are bad; nonetheless, I think the utter loss of Deaf culture would be tragic.
If fatness were safely, easily curable, how many fat people – even fat activists – would take the cure? I suspect nearly all of us would. Would a society in which no one was fat be worse?
Post 7: Sort of a Conclusion
But logically, I realize that human happiness isn’t based on being able to walk, or see, or learn quickly.
* It is an empirical fact that some disabled people, including many with Down syndrome, lead happy lives; it is also true that some nondisabled people are miserable all their lives.
* Multiple studies have shown that ablebodied people who are basically happy before becoming disabled in an accident, remain basically happy people after the shock of being disabled passes.
So perhaps my heart is wrong.
I don’t think efforts to cure or prevent disability should be stopped, because some disabled people would prefer to be non-disabled. But at the same time, I think it’s more important to reform society, and the way we view disability, ability and the pursuit of happiness. That, in the end, has more potential to improve human lives and bring happiness than medicine does.
Maybe.
What strikes me about many of the comments you posted is the false dilemma between certain disabilities (i.e. Down’s syndrome) and “perfect”, as though parents who would rather not have a child with Down’s could only be satisfied with a perfect baby. Weird.
Amp, much to chew on. Thank you.
I share Bauer’s discomfort with selective abortion, and genuinely believe it should be discouraged through education and advocacy. Even assuming fetuses aren’t people who can claim rights, they are individual biological entities; distinguishable from either parent by a unique set of DNA.
If allowed to grow uninterrupted by miscarriage or medical intervention, most fetuses already existing will grow into people. This potential is a real and tangible thing.
That is what would differentiate an effort to eliminate Downs Syndrome through adding folic acid to the water, from the desire to reach a similar goal by offering (and, for lack of a better word, encouraging) selective abortion. The former method removes potential from the equation altogether, making Downs Syndrome itself the target of an eradication effort. The latter method, on the other hand, targets existing biological entities for destruction. These are potential people who, if left alone, would develop into children with Downs Syndrome.
Here’s my problem: I honestly don’t understand how anyone can say she values people with disabilities, and yet argue selective abortion is either a neutral thing or a good one. It’s designed specifically to eliminate genetically unique organisms – the living potentials from which we all develop individually – based solely on their high probability of becoming disabled people rather than able-bodied ones.
It doesn’t matter if the organism will grow into a smart, funny, talented author because these good attributes are outweighed by the existence of a disorder that will make his life less worth living than those of smart, talented, and funny non-disabled authors who are allowed to continue growing according to design.
Yes it does devalue disabled people already alive when supporters of selective abortion argue the existence of a disability is in itself such a catastrophic harm that it outweighs any good packed into a specific set of DNA – that it is morally acceptable to abort an otherwise wanted fetus based on the presence of an “undesirable” characteristic.
This view leads, moreover, to the commodification of life. I personally find more people are treating pregnancy and birth as primarily commercial activities. Wrongful birth suits are but one example of this process. Another is tied in with the argument that disabled kids cost society more and (are assumed to) produce less, thus rendering them less valuable than their able-bodied counterparts. Encouraging this kind of cost-benefit analysis cheapens life, not just in the womb but at every stage. Pensioners, homeless people, those on social assistance, and even prisoners – these groups all produce less tangible economic good for society than strong young able-bodied people who work 40 hours a week.
I believe that folic acid is used to prevent spina bifida, not Down’s Syndrome. Down’s Syndrome is not caused by nutritional deficiencies, and connot be prevented through diet or similar means.
Also, while I don’t think people with Down’s Syndrome necessarily do society “catastrophic harm,” they may do catastrophic harm to parents and families, and they need to be considered too. I do think that potential parents have the right to decide if they want to spend the rest of their lives caring for an individual with such great needs, who may never be independent or accepted by society. It’s heartbreaking to have one’s child be “different” or rejected or suffer in any way, even in much more minor ways. As only one example of many in my personal experience, my brother is a high-functioning autistic individual whose “differently-abled” characteristics tore our family apart, caused my mother untold anguish, and played a great role in my own unhappy childhood (family stress and dysfunction is very common where one family member has problems that require everyone’s energy and attention…)
I don’t think Down’s Syndrome is “minor,” and I personally wouldn’t be willing to bring a Down’s Syndrome child into the world if I had any choice about it. Would you force parents to shoulder a burden of that magnitude if they decided they weren’t capable of it? I think you can only feel that way if you have no real experience of the situation, and view it as a hypothetical moral issue only. Having mental retardation (Sorry, “disability”) is not analogous to having a minor “imperfection” or some idiosyncratic characteristic which adds to the wonders of human diversity. It’s a fairly major chromosomal flaw, one of the few that isn’t fatal. That some parents may be perfectly able to raise a Down’s Syndrome child with love and appreciation doesn’t mean everyone is able to do that, that they should have to, or that there is anything “commercial,” “perfectionistic,” selfish, or morally bankrupt about them.
Jennifer, a couple of studies have shown that women who take folic acid supplements are less likely to have Down syndrome children. However, the work is tentative, and my suggestion of achieving huge results by putting it in the water supply is pure science fiction.
Other than that, I agree with you entirely.
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Abortion should be a private decision made by an individual pregnant woman. Making a decision about having a child with disabilities is hard enough; it shouldn’t be made more difficult by public pressures on either side of the issue. Whatever we think about the decision to abort or not, we are not the ones who have to make and live with that decision.
Believing that we would be better off if a specific disability was eradicated is not the same thing as saying we would be better off without those people who happen to have the disability. It is quite easy to want there never to be another child born with Down Syndrome while still loving someone who has already has it. I have a delightful, sweet, and charming niece with Downs whom I love very much but if I or her mother or any member of our family had the power to cure her, we might hesitate for a bit, thinking about how it would change her but we’d still do it. If we could prevent another Downs child being born, we wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond.
If we could prevent another Downs child being born, we wouldn’t hesitate for a nanosecond.
And I realize I should clarify this statement to add that I meant “by having a pre-natal cure for it.”
I think the big issue here is intent. The implication is that having an abortion may well be perfectly moral for some reasons, but having one for reason X is wrong – in this case because the fetus has Down syndrome. I don’t think questions of intent come into this at all, if a woman has a right to have an abortion (for all the classic reasons: autonomy, bodily integrity, non-personhood of the fetus) then she has a right to have one regardless of the specific reasons why she chooses to do so. I don’t think the type of argument in the article should influence us at all.
I think the reasoning above extends to situations where people decide to abort a fetus because it’s black or a girl or not your husbands or so on, and I’d defend its use in those situations too.
After instigating this post by e-mailing the link to Amp, I e-mailed it to a good friend of mine who has a young son with Down’s. In her case, “the test” came back negative, so they didn’t know about the disability until after he was born. I asked her if she would have chosen abortion if “the test” had come back positive. She replied that she honestly doesn’t know the answer to that question, in part because she nearly miscarried at 14 weeks (which is before they would have gotten any prenatal test results back). The impact of caring for a child with a disability on her family was significant, and the drive-by snarking she gets on a daily basis is very similar to that reported in the article. On the other hand, her son is a wonderful, sunny, funny little boy and she can’t imagine life without him.
I think it is important to discuss the attitudes exhibited by many people towards parents of children with “accidental” disabilities (such as Down’s or spina bifida), as well as towards people with inheritable disabilities who choose to have children. In the context of this thread, is it any different for couples who know their children have a significant chance of CF or Tay-Sachs? Too many people do have the opinion that you shouldn’t deliberately bring a disabled child into the world, maybe because the whole idea of dealing with the disabled squicks them out.
My friend with the Down’s syndrome son once said that having one disabled child should count as having twins – that dealing with the disability is sort of like dealing with another child. So if being pro-choice truly means supporting whatever choice the mother makes, then we should be equally accepting of those who decide they can’t handle the disability as of those who decide that they can, just as we should be equally accepting of people who decide they can’t handle one more (or any) child and of those who decide they can.
M-T, history is full of institutions that exhorted women and men to keep spawning until they could produce a son, because a son was inherently more valuable than a daughter. History is full of institutions that exhorted a woman to have as many babies as she could until it wrecked her health and sometimes took her life, because more was better when it came to having a family. For that matter, it’s been common throughout history to view women who couldn’t reproduce as inherently less valuable in the “marriage market” than women who could.
Can you really sit there and tell me that the “commercial” aspect of birthing is a new thing ?
“It would be less extreme to simply ban testing for Down syndrome.”
Actually, this would be a fairly extreme solution too, since you would have to ban almost all prenatal testing, including amnio and ultrasound. These tests pick up a lot more than Down’s. Would you want, for example, to prevent a woman who had had a child with Trisomy 13 or 18 (both of which are usually deadly within one year of life, after much suffering on the part of the infant and parent) from knowing whether her next child is healthy or suffers from the same abnormality? I think that in such a case, many women would simply chose to not risk another pregnancy. Personally, I would never have risked becoming pregnant if prenatal testing weren’t available. So my perfectly healthy child would never have been born if this ban were put into place. I may be unusual in this, but I doubt that I am unique.
I think the distinction between wanting a “perfect” child and wanting a basically healthy child is an important one. If I were pregnant with a fetus with Down’s, I’d probably have an abortion. If I were pregnant with a fetus with a tendency towards obesity, I wouldn’t. (Unless it had leptin deficiency or lacked a satiety center or some other defect which meant that it would not only be morbidly obese but would never feel comfortably full and suffer from hunger its entire life. That I’d abort to avoid. A tendency towards being overweight, who cares?)
I believe that folic acid is used to prevent spina bifida, not Down’s Syndrome. Down’s Syndrome is not caused by nutritional deficiencies, and connot be prevented through diet or similar means.
I was merely using a ‘for example’ based on something in Ampersand’s post.
Also, while I don’t think people with Down’s Syndrome necessarily do society “catastrophic harm,” they may do catastrophic harm to parents and families, and they need to be considered too
Is it the individual with Downs Syndrome who does catastrophic harm, or the fact society hasn’t provided nearly enough in the way of respite care or other practical support?
I do think that potential parents have the right to decide if they want to spend the rest of their lives caring for an individual with such great needs, who may never be independent or accepted by society.
I agree, in a sense: I’m not for criminalizing abortion or stigmatizing those who have one. My own stance is based on the idea education and advocacy should be used to reduce the rate of abortion – and that includes advocacy for increased scholastic opportunities and better residential placement options for people with severe disabilities.
It’s heartbreaking to have one’s child be “different” or rejected or suffer in any way, even in much more minor ways. As only one example of many in my personal experience, my brother is a high-functioning autistic individual whose “differently-abled” characteristics tore our family apart, caused my mother untold anguish, and played a great role in my own unhappy childhood (family stress and dysfunction is very common where one family member has problems that require everyone’s energy and attention…)
I used to provide respite care to a high-functioning autistic boy. I don’t know what it’s like to live with one, however. I don’t see how this invalidates my initial points.
I don’t think Down’s Syndrome is “minor,” and I personally wouldn’t be willing to bring a Down’s Syndrome child into the world if I had any choice about it. Would you force parents to shoulder a burden of that magnitude if they decided they weren’t capable of it?
I wouldn’t force anyone to do anything, but I would provide increased literature and a pre-surgical chance to interact with kids who have Downs Syndrome. Raising a child with that condition would provide unique challenges, but your characterization of it as a burden suggests you have pre-conceived notions that bear personal examination.
I think you can only feel that way if you have no real experience of the situation, and view it as a hypothetical moral issue only.
And I think you’re making a mistake by impugning my motives when you know little about me or my background.
I’ve spent a great deal of time wrestling with the questions Ampersand presented. My husband has a genetic anomaly – one that promises a lifetime of pain and disfigurement to anyone affected by it, in those cases where it’s not lethal shortly after birth – that he could pass to half our offspring. But his own life has turned out well; he has a close family, a good education, and a great personality.
The world would be a poorer place without him in it. He is, without exaggeration, the only man I’ve ever loved. In our case, pro-choice is as much about coercion as pro-life is to you: where you worry about intrusion into a private decision to terminate a pregnancy, we worry about being penalized both socially and materially for possibly deciding to take a chance.
For my part, I’m legally blind, and find the thought that people “there there” me – “oh, you’re so brave; if the world were perfect, however, you’d cease to be, or there would be a better, faster ‘you’ instead of this one” – to be the ultimate form of dehumanization.
I’m personally tired of my disability, or my husband’s, being used in academic debates about whether disability is such an overpowering characteristic that it could render life not worth living – or less worth living than life without disability.
Having mental retardation (Sorry, “disability”) is not analogous to having a minor “imperfection” or some idiosyncratic characteristic which adds to the wonders of human diversity.
I’m not sure what you mean with the scare quotes, but I think you’re implying I’m so blinded by the rightist version of political correctness that I’m treating disability as a convenient (but wholly academic) moral problem rather than as a living fact that effects real families.
It’s a fairly major chromosomal flaw, one of the few that isn’t fatal. That some parents may be perfectly able to raise a Down’s Syndrome child with love and appreciation doesn’t mean everyone is able to do that, that they should have to, or that there is anything “commercial,” “perfectionistic,” selfish, or morally bankrupt about them.
There’s a heavy whiff of commercialism tied in with the decision to kill a disabled fetus – if not on the part of the parents, than in those sections of the medical community that actively support that option over other alternatives by failing to provide accurate information about disability.
If I had a nickel for every “the doctor said he’d never attend a regular school or have a family” horror story parents have told me, I’d be a millionaire. And I’m just talking about blindness.
Yes, I think parents who pick and choose from among potential children are turning pregnancy into a commercial event. I agree with Bauer that a lot of people are under the impression nature or society somehow owes them a child without blemish; that they have a right to be angry, even going so far as to sue, when their wishes aren’t fulfilled.
FWIW: A random survey of people selected for the following criteria: 1. they were around 2. they weren’t likely to slap me for asking gave the following results to the question of whether they would abort if they were pregnant with a fetus with Down’s: 3 said yes, 2 no, one “depends…how bad is the cardiac malformation” (that’s what I get for asking a cardiologist). Based on these results, I think it’s safe to say that if the decision is left to the individual, Down’s will not cease to exist, for better or worse. Leaving it to the individual seems to me to be the best way: the idea of forcing abortion on those that don’t want it is even more repellant than the idea of forcing those who want it to carry to term.
Correction: I should have said: “Too many people act horrified at the idea of deliberately bringing a disabled child into the world or otherwise treat those who do as misguided,” not “Too many people have the opinion”.
“Too many people do have the opinion that you shouldn’t deliberately bring a disabled child into the world, maybe because the whole idea of dealing with the disabled squicks them out.”
And you are perfectly free to disagree with these people and fight for greater resources for the disabled who, as Amp says, are frequently born as the result of non-discoverable issues, and even more frequently are created after birth by virtue of accidents, illness and, horror, aging. To cast this debate as one solely about the legality of abortion is dishonest, we can help all disabled people without resorting to enforced childbearing for unwilling women. Indeed, to structure the argument as if disability is always the result of prenatal events leads me to suspect strongly that one isn’t worried about the disable, and in fact, that one has only a passing familiarity with disability, so much as one is seeking to restrict abortion by setting up this false conflict between those who make awesomely difficult decisions regarding their whole future and that of their family, and complete strangers who have no legitimate stake in that decision. One does not deny an individual a right simply in order to create a critical mass of other individuals who can sway public policy decisions.
I am all in favor of giving people undergoing prenatal testing accurate information. A geneticist once told me that it’s not easy to get people to keep alarming information in perspective. Wanting a “normal” child is not the same as wanting a perfect child. Most chromosomal disorders are not only catastrophic, they are not survivable. Many fetuses with DS also die before or shortly after birth. Mental skills vary greatly. How you put these incredibly confusing, uncertain and scary possibilities together is an individual decision. Ms. Bauer (along with many in her shoes) is writing from the hindsight perspective of a woman with a high functioning daughter with DS. She should advocate for her daughter, she should disseminate accurate information about DS — but she only gets to live her own life, not other peoples’s.
As for the connection between folic acid and DS — it’s way, way complicated, but women with a specific genetic defect in certain biochemical pathways involving Vitamin B have been linked by some studies (but not others) to an increased risk of giving birth to a baby with DS. And DS children have the same defect, which some argue aggravates common DS “symptoms” that can and should be treated with a special diet. If there is anybody interested in this subject, go look at the following URL:
http://www.homocysteine.net/pages/news/1/2003_11_downs.htm
You could make it illegal for the labs or doctors to report the test results regarding Down syndrome, while leaving it legal to report on other issues.
However, I hope you understand that I’m not advocating this solution at all; I was just mentioning it as something that, while extreme, is less so than entirely banning abortion.
Well put, and I agree. However, some parents of children with Down syndrome – including, I suspect, the author of that Washington Post article – might describe their children with DS as “basically healthy.”
Dianne’s post (#12) reminds me of an article by an article by Osagie K. Obasogie. that I blogged on here.
Essentially, he was arguing that we may need to take steps to prevent sex-selective abortions, but ones that did not involve restricting abortion; i.e. ban prenatal tests for gender, at least until the fetus is too far along for an abortion (assuming that there are retricitons on when abortion is allowed). Unfortunately, he said this in a very roundabout way.
He insisted that it was not logically inconsistent to be for unrestricted access for abortion and to outlaw gender selection (other pro-choice countries have restircitons on methods of gender selection that involve, e.g., centrifuging sperm), but ignored the practical inconsistency; if abortion cannot be restricted or prohibited for any reason, then any method of selecting characteristics in your children that involves aborting children who do not have the desired characteristics is de facto legal. The only way to prevent it is to force the parents to be ignorant about the child as long as abortion remains an option.
It seems to me that anyone who is consistently pro-choice has to support the legality of characteristic selection through abortion; because it is extremely anti-choice to deny someone the right to perform tests on their fetus because they are afraid of what they will do with the information. That is, how can one truly have bodily autonomy if they are not allowed to have certain tests performed on them? (One could, I suppose, argue that the tests are not being performed on them but on the fetus, but that would deny the fundamental pro-choice doctrine that the woman’s autonomy extends to her fetus).
Put another way, if one believes in unrestricted access to abortion but limited access to tests in orer to prevent selective abortion, then one is not truly pro-choice; they are pro-choice only when it does not interfere with their design for society, and are willing to surrender bodily autonomy when it might lead to results they don’t like. (This would apply to Osagie K. Obasogie; but from most of the comments on this issue, I don’t think it applies to most Alas readers).
A sidelight: Many of the pieces I’ve seen about the possibilities of genetic engineering mention “tall” as one of the desirable traits. Now, aside from the fact that not everyone can be tall any more than everyone can be above average, I find it a little chillling that apparently a lot of people think my life (at 4′ 11″) is so unsatifactory that of course it should have been prevented if possible.
On the other hand, I also agree wih the prochoice arguments–I just wish people were less crazy.
If allowed to grow uninterrupted? Try “if supported, protected, supplied with oxygen and nutrients by a woman, who shoulders a heavy and often unpleasant physical burden in order to do so,” most fetuses will grow into people. Fetuses don’t grow on their own.
If they did, we’d have a perfect compromise in removing the fetus, alive, and transfering it to a preemie ward for the next six or seven or eight months. Well, almost perfect; certainly the misogyny that inspires most of the anti-choice movement would find something wrong with that, too, and continue their fight to control women (or maybe they’d just disregard the fetuses as no longer a useful tool to push for control of women). But fetuses DON’T grow on their own; women enable them to become babies, women enable them to become people. Babies, people, humans, don’t make themselves; women make them.
Exactly. I may want children some day. But I am not a baby person; the reason I’d want children is to enjoy them when they’re older, when they’re capable of interacting on a more adult level. Having to carry them in my body and care for them during their first few years is something I would consider more of a burden, something I put up with so that I could have older children that I’ve raised. I would not be a good mother to a child with Down’s syndrome because I am not comfortable interacting closely with people with mental handicaps, whether temporary (as in a baby or toddler) or permanant (as in Down’s syndrome), and because having a child that stayed dependent and childlike in personality and intelligence forever, would never satisfy the reasons I want children, while extending the burden for a lifetime. This means that in addition to not wanting a Down’s syndrome child, I would not be a good mother to a Down’s syndrome child, and therefore I should do all I can to avoid having one, because I am not prepared or willing to make the necessary sacrifices. And certainly if I cannot reasonably expect the benefits I outlined before from a child, I have no reason whatsoever to suffer through a pregnancy.
If I’m going to be morally judged for aborting a pregnancy that could produce a severely disabled child, then I’m likely going to be judged for aborting a pregnancy that would produce an able-bodied, intelligent child.
I carry a gene that could cause a disease in any sons I had. They could go blind by their twenties if they contracted it. However, if I wanted children, I wouldn’t abort based on that.
If the child I was carrying was going to be so disabled that I didn’t think I could handle the financial, emotional, or mental strain, then I would abort. In my case, though, this is moot, as I have no desire to have a child. I couldn’t handle any of that for an able-bodied child–I do not want to be a single mother, or a mother, period. I do not want to be pregnant, and do not want to deal with the physical strain and risks of pregnancy. No matter what the state of the fetus was, I would abort.
What bothers me about these red-herring arguments like the WaPo essay is that judgements are passed on us from either side. I’m either evil for aborting a disabled fetus, or I’m evil for aborting, period. All depending on the reasons, of course. But no one would know my reasons for doing so because they would be no one’s business but mine.
MonkeyTesticle, what you’re not getting is the difference between accepting (and even valuing) disabled people who are already here, and accepting the responsibility to care for one. The former is really no burden at all; the latter is a *huge* responsibility, and not everybody’s capable of doing it; not everybody wants to do it.
I have a friend with cerebral palsy. Being her friend is just fine, but I could not be her mother; I could not have been her caretaker when she was a child. I can be a good friend, a good acquaintance, a good person passing someone disabled on the street or in the mall, but I could not be a good mother.
In addition, the people with disabilities living today already exist; it is not draining *my* resources to keep them alive and healthy, the way it would drain my resources to create a baby, disabled or not, inside me, or the way it would drain my resources to care for a disabled child. Yes, to have children I must accept the possibility of having a disabled child or having a child become disabled; but I will do all I can to make that possibility as low as . . . well, possible. No pun intended.
I believe that it’s wrong to bring a child into the world without seeing to it that that child is cared for, as long as it needs care. To bring a child into the world without intending to care for it yourself, is adding to the number of children needing care, WITHOUT correspondingly adding yourself to the pool of caretakers, and I find this to be irresponsible, and even more so in cases of disability, because that increases the discrepency between care needed and care available even more. While I would never encourage any “selective” abortions (it is, as with all abortions, entirely up to the mother), I do not find the practice reprehensible in the slightest. To refuse to put large amounts of effort toward the making of a baby is any pregnant woman’s perogative, and so is to decide what would be too much of a burden to her, whether in time to prevent that burden from having to fall on someone else, or not. The difference is between “I don’t want it, so I won’t make it” and “I don’t want it, here, somebody else has to take it,” and I completely fail to see how the first is worse than the second.
This is different from the opinion that “you can bring a disabled child into the world if you want to, but don’t tell me I have to.”
If you’re reading my original post, please scroll down to my correction. I accidentally deleted the wrong part of the sentence as I was editing and hit “submit comment” too fast.
I think one of the points that Bauer was trying to make was that there is a certain judgmental attitude among the mostly pro-choice, mostly liberal people she encounters, that you are not making the “problem” of disabled people go away if you don’t take advantage of a legal procedure to abort fetuses that could potentially be disabled children.
If we support disabled people as valuable members of society, then there should be no judgmental comments when the pregnant woman makes her choice. Unfortunately, this is not the case. I think most of us here would agree that as a society we do have a negative bias when it comes to disabilities (especially visible ones).
Although there are always individual exceptions, I think a lot of people change their opinions once they’ve actually got a baby to care for.
Although I don’t have links offhand, I think I’ve read more than one essay by a parent of a disabled child who said that they once thought that they’d never be able to raise a disabled child – but when the reality came about, their attitudes changed.
The reality is, it’s very difficult for most people to live with an infant or child and not learn to admire it for what it is, and treat it with affection. Some people aren’t like that, of course – there’s too many examples of abusive parents to deny that – but I think most people reflexively love the infants they have.
* * *
Lee wrote:
I understand that was a main point she was making, and it may be true, but I wish she had provided a more convincing argument. Instead, most of her examples seemed to be her projecting negative thoughts on to people based on very little evidence – and sometimes the groups she was projecting on to were ridiculously broad, such as “women of childbearing age.” To me, that’s not very persuasive. Her essay, to me, seems to fit in with a long pro-life tradition of just making up horrible attitiudes and beleifs and unfairly attributing them to pro-choicers in general.
Even if she’s right, she’s probably way overstated the case; and there’s very little in her essay to convince me that she is right. On the other hand, I don’t know that she’s wrong, either.
Plus, her choice to make her criticism so completely one-sided – can she really find NOTHING to criticize about conservative attitudes towards the disabled? Are pro-choicers really the ONLY people in this culture who harbor any prejudice against disabled people? – makes me doubt her objectivity.
Therefore, by your logic, we should be perfectly ok with gender-selective abortions.
Well, why shouldn’t you be? Why shouldn’t anyone be?
I really don’t understand all this mushy middle theorizing. Either you think a fetus is a person/a potential person, whose existence is worthy of significant consideration, or you don’t think that.
If you think a fetus is valueless, then there is no discussion to be had; abort if you feel the urge, have the baby if you feel the urge. Abort to avoid Down’s syndrome or because you decide you don’t want to stop working for a month or to save your life or because you look fat in maternity clothes or because you find out the kid is a girl and girls are considered a burden in your culture. It makes no difference what your motivation is; if a fetus is garbage, then do whatever you want.
If you think a fetus is worthy of consideration as a person or as a potential person, then and only then is there some kind of moral dilemma to face concerning any aspect of abortion. Then and only then are any of these questions even of theoretical interest. There’s no coherent position that a fetus has no significant existence, and yet there’s some question about it being OK or not OK to abort for particular reasons. You gotta buy a “Fetuses are important” ticket if you want to ride the abortion as a moral dilemma train.
MonkeyTesticle, what you’re not getting is the difference between accepting (and even valuing) disabled people who are already here, and accepting the responsibility to care for one. The former is really no burden at all; the latter is a *huge* responsibility, and not everybody’s capable of doing it; not everybody wants to do it.
I do see the difference, Kyra; I just don’t assign it the same value as you do. This is, in my opinion, precisely the same kind of argument closet homophobes make when they say, “we think it’s okay to be gay, but we don’t want those homos holding hands or kissing in public.” In this case, the argument reads, “we value the disabled, just as long as we can avoid ending up financially or emotionally responsible for helping someone with a disability.”
I have a friend with cerebral palsy. Being her friend is just fine, but I could not be her mother; I could not have been her caretaker when she was a child. I can be a good friend, a good acquaintance, a good person passing someone disabled on the street or in the mall, but I could not be a good mother.
I see your point and respect you for saying it straight, but I honestly think such a view devalues the disabled. There’s no way around this impasse. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
This is different from the opinion that “you can bring a disabled child into the world if you want to, but don’t tell me I have to.”
This is why I occupy that lonely gray zone between pro-life and pro-choice: I don’t think law makers or pressure groups or anyone else should be intruding on the privacy of women by telling them they have to carry a child to term (or not). But I still think the act of abortion – and, in this case, the act of aborting a disabled child for its disability – is morally wrong. Fetuses should be worthy of moral consideration.
Another reason why I can’t find sorority among pro-lifers is because their positions, in general, are contradictory. I can’t, for example, understand how anyone could be both a social and economic conservative at the same time – how someone can justify cutting social service programs while castigating women for aborting unwanted children; or how someone else can argue children are a gift from god then complain because women having “unauthorized” sex aren’t being forced to bear children as a curse for wrongdoing.
Some points:
1. The best quote on this matter I have read is from Michael Berube (who has a child with Down’s). When told of someone who wanted to abort after a positive test for Down’s because they didn’t want a “‘tard.” (Paraphrase) That person is an asshole. The last thing we want to do is to encourage the idea that assholes should be raising disabled children. Couldn’t find the post I’m thinking of, but here’s a great one about his kid.
2. One thing that noone has mentioned is that non–rich families didn’t raise severely disabled children in the home until the 1960s and 70s. For the most part they did not survive early childhood, or were institutionalized. The expectation that a family should devote its resources to nurturing a disabled child and maintaining him or her into adulthood is only a generation old.
3. Snark overcame me and I wanted to tell Patricia Bauer: “Bitch, if you didn’t dress your kid in such fucking ugly clothes people wouldn’t stare at him, now would they?”
4. I think I would also tell her to get over herself. People looked oddly at Down’s Syndrome children before there was legalized abortion.
I can’t, for example, understand how anyone could be both a social and economic conservative at the same time – how someone can justify cutting social service programs while castigating women for aborting unwanted children
When examining an apparent contradiction in the thinking of someone else, I find it useful to recollect that their starting assumptions may be different. For example, I find it contradictory that people who say they care about the well-being of the working poor also support a wide variety of legislation that damages the interests of the working poor; but the people supporting the legislation don’t believe it to be damaging. This is a difference of opinion and worldview, not a flaw in their logic.
Imagine that you believe government charity drives out and weakens private charity, and that government social programs are iatrogenic – i.e., that they usually make the problem worse rather than better.
Now you’re an (intellectual) conservative, and the contradiction disappears. Cutting into government-run social services helps the less fortunate, or so we believe. Private social services are another matter entirely, which is why we like things like government vouchers for private welfare agencies and churches and such.
For details on this thought pattern (which although not obviously and manifestly and undeniably true, is supported by a fairly considerable body of evidence) see Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground”.
or… argue children are a gift from god then complain because women having “unauthorized” sex aren’t being forced to bear children as a curse for wrongdoing.
I am not aware of any conservatives who make that argument, although I am aware that it is a frequent charge leveled by the shriller variant of feminist. Could you provide a cite?
“Either you think a fetus is a person/a potential person, whose existence is worthy of significant consideration, or you don’t think that.”
At risk of going off on a tangent, I don’t agree. One can think that some fetuses are more worthy of consideration, others less so. The line I draw has to do with the beginning of conciousness. It’s an imperfect distinction as exactly when conciousness first appears is unclear. However, it is virtually physically impossible for it to occur in the first trimester, when about 90% of abortions are performed. During that time, I have no problem with people aborting for whatever reasons seem good to them and whether I think their reason for wanting an abortion is a good one or not is completely irrelevent. On the other hand, a 35 week fetus with normal neurological development probably does have some level of conciousness and therefore is very worthy of consideration. At that point, abortion is much harder to justify, although I have problems barring abortion even at this point in the case of anencephaly or elevated risk to the mother.
I am not aware of any conservatives who make that argument
I’m not going to waste my beautiful mind combing through piles of bullshit to find these, but they do exist. The World O’ Crap (http://blogs.salon.com/0002874/) archives are filled with examples. Go look….if you daaaare.
…although I am aware that it is a frequent charge leveled by the shriller variant of feminist. Could you provide a cite?
You’re aware of that, are ya? Can you provide a cite?
Actually, Robert, I decided to get off my lazy butt and find a recent example of the ideology I mentioned above: http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001154.cfm
You’re aware of that, are ya? Can you provide a cite?
Yeah, you, just now. Though I acknowledge that I don’t know if you’re a shrill feminist or not, so that characterization may not apply.
There isn’t a word in the Kass piece you linked that characterizes childbirth as a curse for female wrongdoing.
Amp, I think the main problem with the Bauer piece was that it was a poorly edited venting piece. It could have been a lot stronger and more coherent to make her points really stand out, and yeah, she was using a really broad brush. Maybe this is the “new journalism,” because the N.Y.T. has had a lot of pieces lately that have the same kind of problem. Or (conspiracy theory alert) maybe it was poorly edited because the editor was pro-choice.
But seriously, aren’t we having a valuable discussion about the disability-value of life matrix that she brought up (even though she didn’t present it very well)?
Robert: Either you think a fetus is a person/a potential person, whose existence is worthy of significant consideration, or you don’t think that.
Well, Robert, perhaps not. Perhaps, as you so eloquently pointed out,
For example, there might be a starting assumption that the needs of a living woman get more consideration than those of a “potential person” — which, of course, doesn’t in any way say that the fetus shouldn’t be given consideration and it certainly doesn’t suggest that anyone here thinks, in your quite shrill words, that “a fetus is garbage.”
Well said, Andi.
Lee, I certainly agree that the piece is worth reading and thinking about, and I’m enjoying this discussion. I’m glad you emailed the link to me.
The Bauer piece was quite weak — little more than venting that not everyone is willing to share her experience. What I would say in retort is that there’s a world of difference between accepting the consequences of a decision freely made (including when you refused to find out) and accepting a fate that has been forced upon you by the actions of third parties. Michael Berube is the go to guy on this issue. His posts on his son, and DS and disabled living generally, are wise and compassionate.
Good piece, Amp.
As someone fairly new to studying disability theory and activism, I find the distinction between impairment and disability useful in parsing out a very dense and heartfelt issue.
Impairment is used by disability theorists to describe a person’s physical, mental, emotional reality. Thus, a person with Down’s syndrome may be described as having certain types of neurological impairments.
The disability arises from social (and legal and cultural attitudes) towards this person with certain types of neurological impairments.
What strikes me about this comment thread is that few seem to take up the larger social implications of why parents must decide if they have the resources – physical, mental and economic – to raise a child with Down’s syndrome. They do not make the decision in a vacuum.
At the risk of overstating disability literature, american society despises significant numbers of people living with all types of impairments. Raising a child with Down’s syndrome is more than just enduring the snark drive-bys. It is also about the fact that medicaid and medicare won’t pay for home aid. They’ll happily pay to institutionalize your kid; but won’t pay for them to live at home; even when congressional testimony (see testimony at http://www.notdeadyet.org) suggests that it is cheaper for the government to pay to have the kid live at home.
That we live in a society that forces individual women to make decisions about a fetus with a potential life-changing impairment says much about our society. These are not decisions that we make as communities. Once again, it seems, we force women to do the moral dirty work of our culture.
As a transsexual, I feel ambivalent about prenatal testing for gender. I suspect (though I have no evidence to prove this) a majority of parents would have aborted me.
That some commenters here would not abort me or Amp but would abort a child who tested positve for Down’s speaks, I think, the very hidden nature of ableism in our society.
Ableism is not simply about ramps and assistive listening devices. It is about why certain bodies get devalued. And why temporarily-able bodies folks cannot come to grips with the vulnerabilities and failings of our own bodies. What do we gain by aborting a baby with Down’s syndrome? What do we gain as a society by letting people with disabilities languish in nursing homes and living with a high rate of unemployment (anecdotally: 70-80% of the employed disability community remains unemployed)?
People living with impairments represents the largest group of oppressed people living in the U.S. What I find intriguing is how our aging population will reduce barriers to access for people living with impairments; and whether this acceptance will rework how we understand the “would you have an abortion if you get tested postive for transsexualism? or obesity? or Down’s syndrome” debate.
Kind regards,
Jay
Jay said:
I think some of the people who would make that decision would make it because they are aware of the nature of ableism in our society. The impariment by itself might not be enough to cause them to think their child’s life would not be worth living, or that they couldn’t handle raising the child – but combined with the artificial barriers set up by prejudice against the disabled, it’s more than they could take, or they think their child could handle.
In a society where Down’s syndrome was accepted and accomodated, I imagine there would be a lot fewer abortions of fetuses that tested positive for Down’s syndrome.
As for transsexualism, the commentators here seem to be more accepting of transsexualism than the population at large, and – significantly – I would imagine many of them live in communities where it is accepted. Ask the same set of questions in a community of conservative Christians – assuming you could find some who weren’t opposed to abortion from the start – and I bet most of them would be willing to abort a fetus that tested positive for transsexuality (assuming such a test could be devised).
For myself, I’ve pre-emptively eliminated the discussion, so to speak – I’ve decided not to have any children, in large part because I think our society is so poisinous in general that I wouldn’t want to subject even an able-bodied, highly intelligent, straight person to it, especially with the kind of upbringing I’d be able to provide. (Okay, so I’m an incurable cynic.)
My son had a malignant brain tumor when he was four, seven years ago, that left him mentally and physically disabled. He can’t walk, is incontinent, has a feeding tube (he can eat some but not enough to stay alive), and functions cognitively at roughly age 2.
He is a burden. No two ways about it. My husband and I have to change his diapers, clean up his messes (he loves to throw things, including poop), bathe him, dress him, feed him, medicate him with anticonvulsants, and generally wait on him hand and foot.
All of this puts great stress on me and my husband as well as on our, I’d better be PC and say typically functioning, 9-year-old daughter. Not because of discriminatory beliefs or policies but because our son is just flat-out a lot of work, and will need to be supported in the same way for the rest of his life. Anyone who tries to tell me it’s not a burden, or that I shouldn’t consider it one, will have a fight on their hands. And, with due respect, I don’t believe anyone who hasn’t been responsible for a disabled child 24/7 has a clue what it’s like.
My son will never read or write or hold down a job or be a moral agent. He knows we don’t like his doing some things, but he’ll still do them right in front of us if the impulse takes him, and he has no concept of empathy: he’ll pull his sister’s hair just for the fun of hearing her scream. He will never have a spiritual life in any meaningful sense.
He is just as much a person and just as worthy of respect as I or anyone else. It breaks my heart, though, to think of what might have been.
As a transsexual, I feel ambivalent about prenatal testing for gender. I suspect (though I have no evidence to prove this) a majority of parents would have aborted me.
I think “prenatal testing for gender” really means prenatal testing for biological sex; I don’t think that we have the ability to detect transexualism in the womb yet, and may be unable to do so if the causes are not genetic.
I agree w/ Robert w/ regards to aborting female fetuses. I don’t see how you can be pro-choice (in the sense that abortion is a choice for a woman and anybody she wishes to consult) and wish to outlaw the aborting of fetuses for whatever reason. (Please don’t confuse that with limits on time based on viability/consciousness/whatever parameters one may have for that).
In my view of pre-viability/pre-possibility of consciousness or self awareness fetuses not being people I can’t see outlawing aborting based on genitalia. I may think that it is a stupid & self-defeating choice, but that is my opinion. The fact of the matter, to me, is that it is not yet a person and it is, therefore, entirely up to the woman in question to decide whether to give birth or abort.
As to the rest of Robert’s comment (the part with the fallacious assumptions about value assigned to fetuses), I think that Dianne & AndiF have done a fine job of responding.
Yeah, I agree with Jake. Though it’s pretty amusing that Robert gets to point the finger at those of us who are –to his thinking– unsuitably “ambiguous” on the whole issue of abortion, even though he’s on record here as possibly favoring the procedure in cases of rape or incest.
Would every other feminist in the room who’d be proud to wear the “shrill” label were it bestowed by a self-described proud sexist, please raise her hand ? :p
Glaivaster,
Actually newly emerging research out of UCLA suggests that we may, in fact, begin to test for these types of things. In fact, this research may ultimately overturn one of the fundamental tenents of human biology: that female is the default sex. The determining of sex/gender may prove to be more complex, and less genetic than previously thoughts. For more on this topic, see “More on EDCs” at my blog.
And for your information, folks in the gender community use sex/gender interchangeably.
And I know you did not mean to sound patronizing. ;-0
OK, now apply that same reasoning to the freedom of business large and small to decide which customers they want to engage in transactions with, or which potential employees they should hire and retain (all things I think most of us are abstractly in favor of) . Yet we’re all pretty clear that that freedom doesn’t extend to barring the door to all customers of color, or refusing to hire women, and so forth.
It would be much harder to enforce a ban on sex-selection abortions, but that doesn’t mean it’s a philosophically untenable idea.
Reading all of these comments makes it clear to me why abortion must remain a personal choice.
Yeah, you, just now. Though I acknowledge that I don’t know if you’re a shrill feminist or not, so that characterization may not apply.
I’m a social conservative, but don’t think I should have to trot out my ‘right-cred’ every time someone on an internet bulletin board decides to start a name calling contest by rehashing the tired old canard about how shrill feminists can be *yawn*. Shrill – like the term “chicken hawk” – is yet another meaningless word grown popular, so that now everyone and his dog uses it to describe the speaking styles of people they don’t like. For me, it’s use is a big red flag that warns: “Don’t bother debating with this person; he’ll just waste a whole lot of your time.”
And Kass said, point blank, that he wants to re-stigmatize “bastardy.” There are no two ways about it; anyone who opposes abortion on the one hand, but wants to punish both women and children for existing outside social strictures, treats childbearing as a deserved punishment in those situations.
And Kass said, point blank, that he wants to re-stigmatize “bastardy.”
Where?
He says that the destigmatization of bastardy hampers courtship and marriage; i.e., that it makes people less likely to marry. This is an observation, and not a particularly controversial one. Incentives matter. Nowhere does he suggest that bastardy by restigmatized; indeed, he says that our hearts must go out to those whose parents made these wrong choices.
I’m pretty much with Bean on this one, Lu; what if you didn’t have to fight for help? What if some of those folks who claim euthanasia (for example) should be illegal came to your house and helped on a regular, and substantial, basis?
I understand the characterization of disability as a burden comes from either living with a disabling condition, or with someone who is thus affected. It’s more accurate to say that disability shouldn’t be a burden – that people are, in some ways, adding to this load by being discourteous, unhelpful,, or just plain brainless.
That’s why positive education and advocacy efforts are so important; far more important, in fact, than trying to outlaw abortion.
Provinces in India that have made affirmative efforts to raise the status of women have a much lower incidence of gender selected abortion, without changing any legal structures that are in place regarding abortion (as evidenced by the male to female ratio). If we made comparable affirmative efforts to lessen the social burden of caring for the disabled we might experience a similar reduction in the rate of abortion of DS. Those who think that people should just shoulder the potentially immense burden of what they are given are, in fact, expecting individuals (mostly females) to function at a higher moral level than society itself chooses — it’s no surprise that individuals make the choices that they do, because society merely reflects the majority of individuals who make it up. This, it seems to me, is the conservative libertarian dilemma — expecting people to be no better than they ought to be (the age old expression about not expecting any prizes for retaining one’s virginity until marriage) doesn’t seem to work when the level of effort required is often heroic.
Robert:
Here’s what Kass says about present-day conditions:
Here’s what Kass says causes this ‘profoundly sad state of affairs’:
Yeah Rob, that was a value-free statement if I’ve ever seen one. It’s just impoooossible to see what Kass means by it.
Now, if only we could return to a time when:
And how do we return to this golden era? By reversing the changes that “hamper” the kind of marriage and courtship Kass values. If you think he’s suggesting something different, let’s hear it.
I don’t need to defend or rephrase Kass’ writing; he is quite eloquent.
You want his nuanced and somewhat reasonable, if very old-fashioned, approach to translate into “women who fuck are evil and they have to be punished”. That’s your prerogative, but that isn’t what it says there on the page.
OK, now apply that same reasoning to the freedom of business large and small to decide which customers they want to engage in transactions with, or which potential employees they should hire and retain (all things I think most of us are abstractly in favor of) .
This is true only if you view a fetus as a person – a position that I have explicitly said that I do not hold.
Robert:
I don’t need to defend or rephrase Kass’ writing; he is quite eloquent.
…and quite obvious.
“Eloquent” ? Sure, if you find bodice-rippers eloquent. Yeesh.
“…A spur to manly ardor…” Right. Because in the glorious, golden past, all those men whose “ardor” led them to seek the chaste woman for their wife stayed faithful ever afterwards. None of them snuck off behind the wife’s back to sire bastards on some willing or unwilling “loose” female. Whatever.
It’s true that a lot of the problems facing a child with Down’s Syndrome wouldn’t exist in a non-ableist society–but we don’t live in such a society. Yes, more people with children with Down’s Syndrome who advocated for disabled rights would change this situation. But I don’t think I’m obligated to carry a pregnancy to term and cope with the hardships of raising such a child in order to make a statement and contribute to political change.
FYI–if I lived in India and a female child would drastically lower my socioeconomic status, I just might do a sex-selective abortion. Who knows? I certainly wouldn’t judge a woman who does that.
And even if I did choose to abort a fetus with Down’s Syndrome for ableist, prejudiced reasons, I’m pro-choice because I think I have the absolute right to control my body. This means that I have every right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason or no reason. I don’t think I need a justification.
But wait a moment – that makes no sense. If “disabled lives are just as rich, fulfilling, and worthwhile,” then isn’t it an enormous waste of money and effort to attempt to prevent or cure disability?
I think you’re falling into some black-and-white thinking here, Ampersand. Couldn’t you say that the ability to do certain things freely, things that disabled people can’t do, can help life become more fulfilling–even though not everyone who has ability X is necessarily more fulfilled than everyone who lacks it, and even though there are ways to live a fulfilled life without ability X?
I mean, people can live fulfilled lives if they lack arms, legs, eyes, significant life expectancies, modern medicine, iPods, fertility… It doesn’t mean we don’t want these things. You can say infertile women can have wonderful lives and still say we should look for cures for infertility.
i’m posting because i think the topic is fascinating, and because, as a woman approaching 35 and as yet nulliparous, down syndrome is a legitimate concern to me. a few other things so other readers can properly orient what i’m about to say:
1. i am completely pro-choice. if a woman wants to abort a fetus because of its gender, its chromosomal status, its eye color, whatever, i would not stand in her way. while it is my opinion that some of those reasons may be stupid, it is none of my business. and i wouldn’t wish a girl child on a family that would prefer to abort a female fetus.
2. i believe that a fetus does have some inherent worth. a fetus has the potential to become an independent person. for some reason i can’t put my finger on, i believe that independent people have inherent worth.
3. i believe that a woman, as an independent person, has the right to control her body, and to exercise whatever control over her body she wishes. i believe this right outweighs any right a fetus might have.
that said, here’s my point: despite what bauer and her ilk may think about selective abortion, it should have no bearing on the abortion debate. either you believe that a woman’s rights outweigh those of a fetus, or you believe a fetus’ rights are equal to or greater than a woman’s. if the former, you should support abortion on demand, regardless of a woman’s reasoning. if the latter, you should be against abortion for any reason — including rape, incest, and serious threat to the life of the mother.
throwing down syndrome, gender selection or obesity into the mix should not have any bearing on the central debate. this is not about social engineering, this is about whether or not individual women (and their spouses/significant others) should be able to exercise control over their reproductive lives and make choices about the life they want for themselves and their family.
It’s true that a lot of the problems facing a child with Down’s Syndrome wouldn’t exist in a non-ableist society”“but we don’t live in such a society.
And we never will if people aren’t willing to advocate for a more equal society. This has implications beyond abortion, in that our society does little more than pay lip service to the rights of people who became disabled later in life. Most – yes, most – “adaptations” are poorly constructed attempts to meet legal codes, rather than well-planned efforts to make places easier for everyone to use.
For example: http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1129225.ece
But I don’t think I’m obligated to carry a pregnancy to term and cope with the hardships of raising such a child in order to make a statement and contribute to political change.
Certainly not – and in particular, not if the above is your only reason for doing it. But I would hate to think parents are frightened or coerced into abortion, rather than making the decision without feeling pressured into it by scary stories or guilt trips.
FYI”“if I lived in India and a female child would drastically lower my socioeconomic status, I just might do a sex-selective abortion.
Thus helping to ensure the status quo is true for five generations more instead of just for another two or three. Most people want their children to both inhabit a better world than that where their parents grew up, and make the world a better place for future generations. If parents in India are willing to engage in selective abortion, despite a belief it wouldn’t be right in a perfect world, then they’re doing themselves and their future offspring a disservice.
If I had the power to cure all of my son’s disabilities, I would do it in a heartbeat. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It is pure PC nonsense to argue against trying to prevent or cure disability on the ground that this would somehow devalue disabled people. The person is just as valuable with or without the disability.
You’re basically saying that a disability is part of a person’s identity, and I suppose it can be. But there’s a huge difference between respecting a person’s choice to remain deaf, for example, rather than undergo surgery at the age of 40, and supporting research to prevent deafness. It goes back to bodily autonomy again.
If I could legally do it, would I have my son euthanized? A thousand times no. Of course not. But that doesn’t change anything I said before.
If “disabled lives are just as rich, fulfilling, and worthwhile,” then isn’t it an enormous waste of money and effort to attempt to prevent or cure disability?
I think that people with moderate and low incomes can have lives as fulfilling as the wealthy, that doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t try to become a millionaire if I could.
Bean and MT, I think you are basically saying that the burden of caring for disabled people should be spread more evenly, and in principle I generally agree with you — much as we spread the burden of building and maintaining roads, educating children, and so on. And in fact my family does get “help on a regular and substantial basis”: both kids go to school full time, my son gets various therapies and services through the school, and we have an after-school (adult) babysitter four days a week (I work three days a week, the fourth day of babysitting giving me flexibility and a break). We pay for the babysitter ourselves, of course, but everything else comes from your tax dollars and mine. My son’s education costs roughly six times that of a child who receives no special services.
(Question for Robert and RonF, if you’re lurking: if single people shouldn’t have kids because of the burden it places on the rest of us and because it flouts normal evolutionary rules, does the same apply to knowingly having a disabled baby?)
But it is a burden. You can’t make that go away. If it were spread so thin that no one person felt it much (like highway taxes), it would still exist. And I do know that my son is much more severely disabled than most people with Down’s syndrome, but that’s just a matter of degree.
Question for Robert and RonF, if you’re lurking: if single people shouldn’t have kids because of the burden it places on the rest of us and because it flouts normal evolutionary rules, does the same apply to knowingly having a disabled baby
No.
Why not, Robert?
You mean, why is it OK to not abort the Down’s Syndrome (or what have you) baby, and not OK for a single woman to decide to get pregnant, even though both burden the community?
The first is a selfless act which invites the community to share in the selflessness. The second is a selfish act, made all the more selfish by the fact that it puts an obligation on the community which the community is by design structured to obviate the necessity for.
Robert, you still haven’t explained on the other thread, why a single person’s child is any more of a burden on society than a married person’s child.
Because they use more services, because single-parent homes are more likely to be dysfunctional.
Because they use more services, because single-parent homes are more likely to be dysfunctional.
Both statements are false.
For example, according to an enormous study published in the Lancet (2003) that tracked more than a million children for more than ten years. (Link here.)
Researchers found that single-parented kids were:
twice as likely to develop major mental illness
three (girls) or four (boys) times as likely to develop drug addictions
twice as likely to commit suicide
twice as likely to develop alcoholism
Most tellingly, this study was conducted in Sweden – where social service availability is at pretty much the peak achievable level.
[rolleyes] So if a single woman carries a disabled child to term, do the degrees of “selfishness” cancel each other out ?
My head hurts, and not just because I have a cold.
For example, single-parent families display a host of increased problems (from this research overview:
* Lone parent households are over twelve times as likely to be receiving income support as couples with dependent children (51% versus 4%). They are 2.5 times as likely to be receiving working families tax credit (24% versus 9%).
* Young people in lone-parent families were 30% more likely than those in two-parent families to report that their parents rarely or never knew where they were.
* Among children aged five to fifteen years in Great Britain, those from lone-parent families were twice as likely to have a mental health problem as those from intact two-parent families (16% versus 8%)
After controlling for other demographic factors, children from lone-parent households were
* 3.3 times more likely to report problems with their academic work, and
* 50% more likely to report difficulties with teachers.
(That falls into the “needing more support at school” category, La Lubu – and taking up a disproportionate share of the teacher’s finite time.)
* In England and Wales during 2000, the sudden infant death rate for babies jointly registered by unmarried parents living at different addresses was over three times greater than for babies born to a married mother and father (0.66 per 1,000 live births as compared with 0.18). Where the birth was registered in the sole name of the mother, the rate of sudden infant death was seven times greater than for those born within marriage (1.27 per 1,000 live births as compared with 0.18).
* At age 33, men from disrupted family backgrounds were twice as likely to be unemployed (14% compared with 7%), and 1.6 times as likely to have experienced more than one bout of unemployment since leaving school (23% compared with 14%).
* Although 20% of all dependent children live in lone-parent families, 70% of young offenders identified by Youth Offending Teams come from lone-parent families.80
* American studies have shown that boys from one-parent homes were twice as likely as those from two-birth-parent families to be incarcerated by the time they reached their early 30s.
For example, from this report drawing on Canadian longitudinal studies:
Numerous studies have examined the impact of single- and two-parent families on children’s developmental outcomes, including measures of academic achievement and social emotional well-being. They have demonstrated that children growing up in single-parent families are more likely to repeat grades, to possess poorer language skills, and to be less healthy than children living in two-parent families. These children are also less likely to get along well with friends and parents than children living in two-parent families
I can keep going. There isn’t exactly a shortage of data.
Bottom line:
Single-parent families have higher levels of dysfunction than two-parent families.
Single-parent families use higher levels of social services than two-parent families.
There is little to no credible dispute on these points. What disputes do exist center around peripheral issues.
You may believe whatever gets you through the day, but single parent families are not functionally equivalent to two-parent families in terms of outcomes and in terms of the social inputs required to get those outcomes.
I’m fairly certain that both of these things are also true of families with disabled children, for what it’s worth. I don’t see how you can be a utilitarian when it comes to single parents but not one when it comes to disabled people. But it’s a moot point, because I don’t think you really are a utilitarian when it comes to single parents. You don’t believe in abortion, you don’t believe in single parenthood, and you’ll use whatever contradictory arguments seem to work to defend either position.
I don’t have anything coherent to say about this. On the one hand, I don’t think that disabled people will ever be valued and treated with dignity as long as there’s a cultural assumption that the world would be better off if we’d never been born. On the other hand, I’m really loathe to judge the choices of people dealing with scary and difficult dilemmas, and it’s unfair to downplay the difficulties that come with having a severely disabled child. So I don’t know. I do know that I’m getting a little sick of hearing about how disability issues are “side issues” that distract from the “real issue”, whatever that may be. I wish that feminists would be better about recognizing the way in which disability issues are marginalized, since it’s quite similar to the way in which feminist issues have often been depicted as distractions from the important stuff.
I haven’t read the whole thread in detail, so possibly this question has already been considered, but…Have you considered this question from the point of view of the potential child? I have a varient of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome, which is essentially autism with normal language ability. If you want to know what it’s like, it’s sort of like always using the internet for communication: the language comes through fine, but no non-verbal signals do. It makes social interactions difficult and sometimes painful. It is more or less difficult to live with depending on the social context. In a nerdy, academic family it’s pretty easy to deal with. In a family where most of one’s value was measured by one’s social ability it would be pure hell.
If I found out that I was going to die tonight and had the choice of either being reborn in a family which would value me only for my ability to charm others and interact socially, perhaps because they thought I was valuable only as a potential wife and becoming a wife involves charming a man and (ideally) his family, or having the fetus that would become me be aborted and just being dead, my last act would be to send my potential mother some RU-485. There are worse things than being dead or never being born and one of them is being born to a family that you can never please, no matter what, simply because of who or what you are. So maybe it’s better for a woman who would abort a fetus because it was female, gay, had Down’s, would be fat, or whatever, because she would make the child’s like miserable. Not because she is an awful person or would be an awful mother, but simply because the child would not be able to please her.
I’m fairly certain that both of these things are also true of families with disabled children, for what it’s worth.
Probably.
The difference is that nobody ever sets out to have a disabled child.
Man gets hit by a truck that jumps the curb, society spends million$ on therapy and assistance, I don’t mind at all.
Man jumps in front of a truck for thrills, and I do.
YMMV.
I don’t think that people who don’t believe fetuses have worth/value/rights can legitimately that distinction, Bean. People who do think that fetuses have worth/value/rights (even if those rights are in the end less compelling than an adult woman’s) can make that distinction.
But you’re right that the end result is what really matters.
The difference is that nobody ever sets out to have a disabled child.
I don’t think most single parents set out to be single parents, either. And I don’t think that the data you cite differentiates between those who do, most of whom have probably made some judgements about whether they’re in a position to raise a kid alone, and the much larger number who find themselves in a situation in which they didn’t necessarily want to be.
I don’t think that people who don’t believe fetuses have worth/value/rights can legitimately that distinction, Bean.
I think they can. There will never be genetic testing that will be able to screen out all disabilities, so there will be disabled people for the forseeable future. And it’s really not good for disabled people to be seen as the unfortunate folks who fell through the prenatal screening cracks. If people look at me and think “someday maybe we’ll have good enough prenatal testing that people like that won’t be born,” they’re going to have a hard time seeing me as someone with worth and dignity. It is possible not to value fetuses but to value the disabled people who are born and actually exist in the world.
There are also those who can see value/worth/rights of all fetuses, but can recognize that at certain points, and for certain reasons, someone else value/worth/rights outweigh those of the fetus.
Well, you’ll need to argue with Mythago (I think it was), then. According to her, that position – which I basically share – is completely untenable.
No. I am not making that assertion.
I am raising a dichotomy. If you believe that a fetus has no value, then it is illogical/invalid/illegitimate for you to engage in moral navel-gazing about whether it’s OK to abort in this or that or the other circumstance. You’ve have already established as a foundational premise that fetuses have no value – and that they can therefore be treated as you wish. No morality applies to our handling of morally valueless objects.
If you believe that a fetus has some value – then it makes sense for you to be wondering about the moral calculus involved. Since you have stated that you do believe a fetus has moral value, as do I, then you and I (or either of us separately) can have a relevant discussion about whose rights are more important in a particular circumstance, or if it’s OK to abort in a certain circumstance, or what a public policy ought to be, or what have you.
You believe that a fetus has some value. Very well, it is rational for you to balance rights and obligations and all the rest and decide whether a given abortion is appropriate/acceptable or not. Only if you disbelieve in that fetal value does it become logically bizarre for you to wonder about the morality of a particular abortion choice.
Uh, no. The fetus I’m carrying can be treated as I wish. The one bean, Sally, your spouse, etc. are carrying ?– that’s not in my power. Nor would I want it to be.
Thus helping to ensure the status quo is true for five generations more instead of just for another two or three.
Monkey Testicle: yes. But if someone really were going to suffer for having a female child (e.g. financially, emotionally, mistreatment by the rest of your family for bearing only female children) I wouldn’t hold it against them for choosing not to fight the status quo through childbirth. There’s a limit to how much we can expect people to do to change society; childbirth and childrearing are past that limit.
I completely agree that people shouldn’t feel forced into unwanted abortions because of medical advice or social values or what-have-you; I’m just equally concerned about the effects on women if you add to their burden of guilt when it comes to abortion.
Bean, I wasn’t using “you” in the personal sense. If ONE believes that fetuses have no value…etc. Sorry for the confusion.
Robert, the children of single mothers do just as well in school”. You might also want to check out Myths and Facts about fatherlessness”. I find it interesting that in your first link, one of the doctors cited brought up that the issue was not single parents, but quality of parenting. Poor parenting can take place in either single or married homes, with the exact same results. Controlled for income, the children from single parent homes do just as well as their same-income married counterparts.
Why haven’t more studies been done comparing non-poor single parent families where there was no traumatic dysfunction to the child (parent splits before birth, or soon afterward, or single mom went to the sperm bank), with non-poor married families? Because the results would clearly show that the single status of the parent does no harm to children—and that is threatening to the world view of those who insist upon gendered sex roles, women submitting to husbands, and the whole nine yards of b.s.
In any case, before we get too far off track (since you ran away from the original thread that held that particular line of argument, something I’ve noticed is your M.O.), not every pro-choice person believes that a fetus has no value. In fact, very few pro-choice people seem to have that view. Pro-choice people just tend to believe that in the grand scheme of things, the woman, the actual, present person takes precedence over the fetus, the potential person.
Actual. Potential. Ok? So, it is not illogical to take issue with certain reasons for abortion, like aborting because of race or gender. Even if the particular pro-choice person doesn’t assign any value to a fetus, that pro-choice person probably does assign value to actual, present people, and can still find the idea of erasing every particular representation of humanity—-as in genocide, for example—-through abortion, morally repugnant. Or, as has been discussed here, aborting disabled fetuses for that reason. It is an entirely different matter to say “I want an abortion because I simply can’t handle the time or expense of raising a severely disabled child” than to say “disabled fetuses should be aborted because they would only turn into nonproductive citizens, a drain on society”. Or even, “ok, you don’t have to abort your disabled fetus, but since you chose not to abort, screw you! No assistance for your selfishness!”
La Lubu, your study follows 1500 people for four years. Just one of mine followed a million for more than a decade. The Cornell study is interesting; it ought to be looked at; it is a far outlier in the social science research, which overwhelmingly supports the proposition that single-parent families are worse off. Not a little bit; not it’s a value judgment; overwhelmingly.
Sigh. Robert, I am not disputing that drug-addicted single parents in impoverished, neglectful environments do a worse job at raising children than married, middle-class non-dysfunctional homes. What I am disputing is that there is any difference in the outcomes of children raised in single parent homes and married homes, when the other factors have been controlled for. Compare the drug-addicted neglectful single parents with the drug-addicted, neglectful married parents. Compare the loving, involved, supportive single parents with the loving, involved, supportive married parents. Same results.
The reason this matters, is because the focus on marriage as a remedy for some or all of the ills facing single parents is wrong-headed, and produces negative results. I’m not anti-marriage. I’m neutral to marriage. What I am saying is that generally marriage is viewed as a positive, when it should be viewed neutrally. Marriage is not always a positive, or we wouldn’t have the divorce rate that we have in this society.
Think I’m just being contrary? The first link you cited was from an organization dedicated to helping stepfamilies heal wounds—wounds of divorce or trauma from their own family of origin. Obviously, marriage isn’t always a positive, no? It can be. It can also be a negative. In and of itself, marriage is a neutral factor.
Not that I’m anything less than fascinated by Robert’s views on the relative crappiness of single parent families, which I guess it’s possible we’ve all missed the other 50,000 times he’s stated them, but does anyone have anything further to say about the ethics of aborting fetuses that would end up being disabled?
which overwhelmingly supports the proposition that single-parent families are worse off
In Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s article “Dan Quayle Was Right,” she cited studies showing that children in stepfamilies were worse off, emotionally, than children in single-parent families.
Robert’s idea of pro-choicers not valuing a fetus, disabled or not, is wrongheaded. We all know this- look around at the mothers you know. They valued their pregnancies. They love their kids. Yet a huge percentage of them have had abortions.
I think the pro-choice stance is simple, ethical and practical: sometimes a fetus’ rights are in conflict with the mother’s and maybe her other children’s. More so, perhaps, if it is disabled. The mother, owner of the host body and captain of the family, has the veto. End of story.
My husband’s nephew is severly disabled. He has little or no corpus callosum- I don’t know the name of the condition. His family is Ecuadorean. When he was 11, they came to Florida for three years because this “ableist” society has free special education, even for foreign immigrants. They are very wealthy, and in Ecuador can afford for a fulltime live-in caretaker and a full time live-in maid. He is 17 and can’t walk, eat or go to the bathroom by himself, or talk more than a few words. He’s like a 17 year old 1 year old baby. They love him like crazy. They have support and love from a HUGE extended family. I asked my husband if he would want to go forward with a pregnancy if he knew the baby would be like his nephew, and he said absolutely not. I have never asked his sister the same question of course, but I wonder. The question wouldn’t be: do you wish he weren’t here? The question would be: if your daughter had to choose between living with having had an abortion and a lifetime of a severly disabled person for her and her other children to deal with, which would you want her to choose? And how can we be surprised when women are practical and protective of themselves and their other children and decide they’s rather deal with the guilt than deal with all that raising a very disabled child entails?
I find the discussion over whether or not abortion for Reason X should be allowed tiring; obviously, no one in the pro-right-to-an-abortion (I am not using the term “pro-choice” for reasons that will become obvious) community is going to argue that a woman should ever be prevented from getting an abortion if she so chooses.
So, really, the actual policy question in here is not whether or not abortion should be restricted.
The question, as I alluded to before (comment#18), and as a few other people have touched on, is going to be whether or not the government should prevent selecctive abortions by banning parents from having the information needed to make a selection.
Those who believe we should do so are, in my opinion, hypocrites; they may be pro-abortion-rights, but they are not truly pro-choice nor do they actually believe that people should be given control over their own bodies.
paul writes (#49):
It would be much harder to enforce a ban on sex-selection abortions [i.e., than enforcing a ban on workplace discrimination based on race], but that doesn’t mean it’s a philosophically untenable idea.
It’s not philosophically untenable, but it does mean that the person advocating such a policy really doesn’t value bodily autonomy all that much, and is really not pro-choice.
A better comparison than workplace discrimination would be discrimination in one’s sex life. In such a case, bodily autonomy certainly implies the right to discriminate based on race. (That is, a person who wants to only have sex with people of a certain race has the right to refuse to have sex with anyone else).
Also, this statement (paul, #49):
OK, now apply that same reasoning to the freedom of business large and small to decide which customers they want to engage in transactions with, or which potential employees they should hire and retain (all things I think most of us are abstractly in favor of).
Does not strike me as true at all of most of the people who write for/comment on this blog.
By the way, in case it isn’t clear, the reason I used the term “pro-right-to-an-abortion” rather than “pro-choice” is so as to include the people who favor abortion rights but who believe that the parents’ access to information on their fetus ought to be restricted by law to prevent them from being able to use abortion for selection; such people are not truly pro-choice, but they are one side of the debate between whether or not prenatal tsting should be restricted, so I used a term that included them.
I guess I find the whole question of banning selective abortion, or for that matter banning prenatal testing, kind of a distraction. Neither of those things is going to happen, at least not in the U.S. There’s no political will to make it happen, except from a tiny segment of the disability rights community, who don’t count for anything to anyone with power. What is much more likely, actually, is that the reverse will happen. In a post-Roe America, I think we’re likely to see a lot of anti-choice laws that make a specific exemption for fetuses that would have disabilities. An awful lot of basically anti-choice people believe that “innocent” parents should be protected from the pain of having to raise defective children. Anti-abortion laws with “health of the child” exemptions are my absolute nightmare scenario, from a disability rights perspective, and obviously that’s a grim prospect from a pro-choice perspective as well.
I’m never going to be crazy about the idea of aborting fetuses because they’ll have Down’s Syndrome. But to me, the solution to this lies in the culture, not in legislation. If parents know that having a kid with Down’s won’t be a catastrophe for the kid or for their family, they’re much more likely to go through with the pregnancy. The solution is to improve services, treatment, and education. On the other hand, there’s no constitutional right not to feel guilty, and I’m not going to keep quiet about the fact that I think parents who abort disabled fetuses hurt all disabled people. It is not just a personal decision. It’s not just an exercise of personal autonomy. It is those things, which is why I have trouble condemning it. But it also contributes to the idea that disability is so tragic and horrible and burdensome that disabled people should be prevented from existing.
There’s no political will to make it happen
There’s political will against it. People are always pro-choice when it comes to abortions they think they might need.
Right. It’s partly that many people think they would want to abort a fetus that would have disabilities, and it’s partly that parents who abort for that reason are conceived of as innocent victims, and a lot of the anti-choice impulse is about punishing single women for being sexually active.
So can we stop pretending that the all-powerful disability-rights cabal is going to trample on your sacred rights? That’s a convenient frame for people who don’t want to engage with critiques of selective abortion, but it doesn’t have any basis in reality.
This is Linnet quoting Monkey Wrench
I have a more fundamental objection. I don’t believe that giving birth to, and raising, any child, will make any difference to your society. Individuals deciding to bring girl children to term doesn’t stop misogyny; individuals deciding to bring Down’s Syndrome pregnancies to term won’t change our society’s attitudes to, or resources for, people with Down’s Syndrome.
individuals deciding to bring Down’s Syndrome pregnancies to term won’t change our society’s attitudes to, or resources for, people with Down’s Syndrome.
I don’t agree with this. If the default solution to the problem of Down’s Syndrome is to prevent people with Down’s Syndrome from existing, then there’s no reason to put resources into improving the lives and opportunities of people who have Down’s. We don’t fund research into rare conditions: I can tell you that as someone who has one. (And since there will probably be class bias in who gets prenatal testing, it’ll probably also be true that disabled people will increasingly come from poor families, which is to say people with very little political clout. People with cognitive disabilities have benefited quite a bit from having various Kennedys advocating for better treatment and services.) If people who have kids with Down’s are seen to have made a choice, and if it’s seen to be a freakish choice that normal people would not make, then it’s much easier to say that they’re responsible for dealing with the consequences of their choices and that they shouldn’t expect the government to help. And in general, if disabled people are seen as merely the sum of their disabilities, rather than people with both potential and impairments, then they’re not going to be valued by society. Every time someone hears about a relative, a neighbor, or a person in the newspaper deciding to abort a fetus because they decided that fetus’s future disabilities outweighed its potential, that sends a message about how you should think of all disabled people.
I read Lu’s story, and I know that I couldn’t handle it. And if I knew my pregnancy would lead to a child that severely disabled, I’d probably chose to abort. And offering the explaination that things would be better if there was more support for families with severely disabled kids doesn’t change anything for Lu or people like her right now. And it doesn’t change anything for people who know they can’t handle such a situtation. Condemning them might make someone feel better, but it’s rather odd, considering the fact that we’ve already acknowledged that there is little support for parents like Lu. And forget it if you’re poor and can’t even affrod the time or money to get the meager resources out there.
Linnet:
There’s a limit to how much we can expect people to do to change society; childbirth and childrearing are past that limit.
Why? Almost all people want their kids to inhabit a better world, and to influence society, but few are willing to follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion: childbirth itself is a catalyst for change.
I completely agree that people shouldn’t feel forced into unwanted abortions because of medical advice or social values or what-have-you; I’m just equally concerned about the effects on women if you add to their burden of guilt when it comes to abortion.
It’s one thing to affirm the right to chose, but quite another to value that choice so much you refuse to offer up anything that calls it into question.
Reddecca:
I have a more fundamental objection. I don’t believe that giving birth to, and raising, any child, will make any difference to your society. Individuals deciding to bring girl children to term doesn’t stop misogyny; individuals deciding to bring Down’s Syndrome pregnancies to term won’t change our society’s attitudes to, or resources for, people with Down’s Syndrome.
I profoundly disagree. Society isn’t some great unchanging monolith that stands guard over successive generations; it’s the people alive now, and the people yet to be. When even one person is born, that individual becomes part of the social fabric, either enriching it through his acts or causing it to decay. When even one Indian parent says, “I’m going against social convention to knowingly bring a girl into this world,” people see that and have to deal with its implications whenever they look upon the child. She exists because her parents decided she was of as much value as a boy would have been.
Lu’s child’s disability occurred after birth and couldn’t have been prevented by selective abortion. So if you really think you couldn’t handle being in her situation, you shouldn’t have children. There is really no way to ensure that you won’t have a disabled child. That risk is part of being a parent.
As I said, people who are poor have less access to prenatal testing and are likely to be left high and dry when wealthier people opt out of having disabled kids.
If people who have kids with Down’s are seen to have made a choice, and if it’s seen to be a freakish choice that normal people would not make, then it’s much easier to say that they’re responsible for dealing with the consequences of their choices and that they shouldn’t expect the government to help.
This is exactly what I see in mainstream U.S. culture. There seems to be a resentment against parents who didn’t abort fetuses with Down’s; there’s this idea that “abortion is legal, so why didn’t you have one?” It’s the same attitude expressed towards single mothers, with the same rationalization—the cult of individualism that says we are only responsible for ourselves, and have no obligations to the society as a whole that sustains us (other than obeying the law and going to war, natch). People with disabilities are an uncomfortable reminder of human frailty and mortality, and the fact that, like it or not, we are all dependent upon the work of others to get by. I see parallels with how the disabled and the elderly are disrespected and segregated in this society.
When I was pregnant, I was looked at strangely by the medical staff for not wanting prenatal tests for disabilities; my feeling was that since I wasn’t going to abort anyway, why incur the risk of miscarriage? But there was definitely this feeling that I had crossed a boundary. And I think that’s sad. Full disclosure here: my daughter was an extreme preemie, but ended up not being disabled (although it remains to be seen if she has any learning disabilities that may affect her processing—she’s just started kindergarten). She was at high risk though, and required extensive medical intervention and three years of therapy to bring her up to speed. She’s probably had over a million-and-a-half worth of medical care over her young life. When she was in the NICU, I spent pretty much all my time there, coming home only to eat, shower and sleep (I live a few blocks from the hospital, so it was pretty easy to be in the NICU all the time). I’d eat my dinners in front of the computer, researching her conditions; educating myself and learning the lingo—-you get more respect and information from medical personnel if you can get up on their terminology. And I found plenty of articles in medical journals, written by physicians, lamenting the expense of caring for preemies, especially since the majority of them were going to end up disabled. It’s also about a price tag. Some lives are literally valued less than others.
Lu’s child’s disability occurred after birth and couldn’t have been prevented by selective abortion. So if you really think you couldn’t handle being in her situation, you shouldn’t have children. There is really no way to ensure that you won’t have a disabled child. That risk is part of being a parent.
Yes, but the effects–having to cope with a situation you can’t handle–are the same. My point was that if she–or anyone else–knew their fetus was going to develop a disability that would be as severe as she described, I wouldn’t waste my breath condemning her for choosing abortion. Telling people that’s the way it is and don’t have children if you can’t handle it doesn’t change anything, any more than telling them that things would be better for them if only they had more support.
As I said, people who are poor have less access to prenatal testing and are likely to be left high and dry when wealthier people opt out of having disabled kids.
I disagree. Wealthy people who live in wealthy towns and have the power to advocate for and organize funding for the resources in their towns and schools for their kids will not have much of an effect on the lives of poor people. It isn’t just a question of resources, it’s a question of working a night shift or staying home with your disabled kid who may be taken away from you if you work the night shift because it would be seen as neglectful. Or you could pay a caregiver, but who has the money? Being poor means you can’t afford the time, let alone the money, to even arrange for these resources.
My point wasn’t that we’re better off without disabled people, but that judging someone for terminating such a pregnancy isn’t going to help. It’s your right to make those judgements, but until things to change for families with severely disabled kids, judging them won’t help. People make choices based on the current situation and the resources available to them.
As for me not having children–I don’t have them and I don’t want them–mainly because I couldn’t handle having kids, period. Maybe I’ve been rude, and if I was, I apologize. While I realize that you aren’t anti-choice, I’ve run into a lot of judgements for my choices. Too many women who’ve had abortions are expected to somehow justify them and apologize for them, no matter what the situation. If I projected my great irritation and my extensive experience on the receiving end of this on you, I apologize.