My friend Prof. Ginny Arbery of the University of Dallas has written a magnificent essay defending the human dignity of Julia, her adult Down syndrome daughter, against what she (correctly) identifies as a society undertaking a pogrom against these children. Excerpt:
We were all working for that fullest expression of life and happiness for our babies. I thought about the "prudent" mothers who had aborted their own children with Down syndrome. I grieved for those who, exercising their reproductive rights – a new appropriation of the older notion of liberty, which was rooted in duty – would never know the profound satisfaction of raising such a child.I will never forget Julia's first birthday with all her sisters around her. When we finished singing happy birthday, Julia put her hands together and clapped for the first time. Of course, we all cried on cue. Things that were so ordinary for the others became accomplishments – triumphs.
Julia slowed us down, and, instead of waiting for each stage of development to naturally emerge, we would coax it along, beckoning it with intentionality and art. She taught each child an intelligence of the heart, and she began to teach me patience.
[snip]
I understand that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is offering women a safer method than amniocentesis to determine whether a child has Down syndrome. The College makes the argument that it is more responsible to inform parents of their options beforehand so that they can decide whether or not to let the baby live.This argument shakes me to the core, for it bears all the marks of a pogrom – the license to be aggressive against the most benign population conceivable.
Until now I have never been an advocate of special needs' issues. I have quietly reared my daughter and her brother and six sisters. But I can remain silent no longer. Twenty years ago, many of Julia's potential friends who are like her were intentionally eliminated, perhaps out of fear or perhaps out of a desire for a regular family with regular children.
I think of those thousands of children who will never change those families for the better. They will never be at a Down syndrome dance, never hug their grandmothers, unafraid of their wrinkles or of people's imperfections. Who will love us as well, as simply, with such undesigning candor if we invent a world protected from our difficult blessings?
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Erin,
No one is suggesting that an 18 week-old fetus doesn't exist, isn't living, isn't important or that abortion kills it. And while the traits you mentioned are observable I think there are problems with invoking them. One great and crucial ability of the human species is the ability to identify with other humans, to recognize and empathize with other beings on the basis of perceived similarities and projection. This was probably an essential, adaptive trait in the evolution of our very social and intelligent species. It is not a perfect trait, however, as we also 'project' human traits on other animals (pets in particular) and even inanimate objects. On one side, this behavior permits human cooperation but on the other side it is often applied in situations that might not be valid and could even be detrimental.
So, would your opinions change if instead of fingers, the fetus had flippers or no limbs at all? Would it really matter to you whether a fetus of that stage looked like a jellyfish instead if by some chance that happened to be part of normal human development? Do those features or your identifying with them ultimately matter in your moral assessment of whether abortion is OK? If not, why introduce them?
Second, like humans, the fetuses of other mammals also go through stages of suckling and develop diurnal cycles... But the odd thing is that we eat and experiment upon other mammalian species. So it would appear that digit sucking and responses to some stimuli are not sufficient indicators of the moral status of a fetus displaying these traits. There are other, more complex and difficult to assess criteria involved. I accept that various human traits arise at different stages during the developmental process and that sometimes this makes assessments difficult. This is not to say that I think there are no human traits that provide good criteria for when abortion would be morally questionable, only that I don't think these generally appear within the first trimester.
I hesitate to bring this up but does the fact that preimplantation genetic diagnosis methods are available alter anyone's opinion of discarding particular embryos?
Unsymp, the ethical dilemmas are easier to create than to discuss. Just making an observation; don't be surprised if your questions go unanswered, or even unremarked.
I'd like to see your question and raise it a notch: as genetic analysis becomes more accurate, more detailed and more prevalent, does the society-at-large have the right to deny conception to couples whose embryos have a (greater than some arbitrary) chance of being defective in some specific way?
Should any level of support, from society down to family, be expected or even defined as ethical for a couple who procreate knowing that some significant number of their offspring will draw an unusual level of resources and time just to survive?
For anyone who is unable to picture this, there is a plethora of speculative fiction out there that at least describes some of the possibilities. Or, one could draw parallels to past cultures who took overtly disabled babies out to die by exposure.
And, to anticipate the Darwinian angle: at what point do we deny that nature will kill babies with a low chance of survival as a necessary mechanism protecting the health of the species?
I recently reread ''Hitler's Willing Executioners'' by DJ Goldhagen (pub. Abacus, 1996). Writing about Nazi behaviour in 1939 he observes ''The mentally ill and severely handicapped were conceived of as biological cripples ... these people needed to be killed''. With reference to the Euthanasia programme he observes (page 398) ''Coldly uninvolved were the Germans who killed the mentally ill and the severely handicapped ... Most of them were physicians and nurses who dispatched their victims in the dispassionate manner of surgeons, who excise from the body some hideous and hindering excresence.''
Note especially that word ''hindering''. How far have we come in seventy years? At least we can do it earlier.
Dear me . . . I check on this thread occasionally, hoping that some of the really interesting questions raised above will receive some discussion. But alas, I guess the topic is officially over now, since Hitler has been invoked.
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