This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #21, on the subject of Genetic Counseling and Eugenics.

Quite a few years ago now I knew a girl, a childhood friend of my wife, who married a man with Crohn’s Disease.  Not long after the wedding she had a tubal ligation, and they bought a dog to pamper.  The explanation was that Crohn’s is genetic, and her husband did not want to bring a child into the world who would suffer what he had suffered.

This kind of decision is made all the time.  It is called genetic counseling, when medical professionals evaluate the probability that a couple will pass a genetic disease to their children.  Sickle cell anemia is one of the most common of such maladies, and many black families forego having children to stem its transmission.

People want babies.  It’s part of being human.  However, it is also part of being human that people want healthy babies.  Obstetricians have the highest malpractice insurance rates of all doctors, because imperfect babies are born and horrified parents want to blame someone with a lawsuit.  Modern technology has made it easier to have perfect babies.  The parents who might be carriers of sickle cell can have their unborn child tested in utero, and if the child has the disease, it can be aborted, never forced to live with the pain of this crippling disease.  The same can be done for Crohn’s Disease, Spina Bifida, Down Syndrome…or can it?

North Dakota has made it illegal to perform an abortion based on detected fetal abnormalities.  Ohio is likely to pass a similar law banning abortions performed because the unborn child has Down Syndrome.  To those who support abortion, these laws, described as acts to protect the handicapped, are outrageous impositions on a woman’s rights.  Yet there is something to the argument.

Although statistics are difficult to determine with any accuracy, everyone agrees that the majority–anywhere from sixty to ninety percent–of unborn children diagnosed prenatally with Down Syndrome are aborted in the United States, and that the estimated rate is higher in Europe where it might reach ninety-five percent.  Some parts of the world applaud this as a reasonable means of wiping out a genetic disease.  To some, the termination of pregnancy because the unborn child has a serious genetic defect is considered one of the best reasons for such a decision.

What, though, can be more discriminatory against the handicapped than killing them because of their handicap?

Oh, but wait:  an unborn child is not, under the law, a handicapped person; he is only a growth that has the potential to become a person.  He has no rights, and therefore killing him is not an act of discrimination against a handicapped child, but the excision of a deformed growth.  The rights of the handicapped, and the fact that they are killed almost routinely, are irrelevant.

This, though, might not be a position anyone wants to take.  After all, seven states–Arizona, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota–ban sex selective abortions as acts of gender discrimination.  It is against the law in those states to terminate an unborn female child because you wanted a son (or presumably to terminate a male because you wanted a daughter).  Arizona also bans abortions based on the race of the unborn child as being racially discriminatory.  To say that the unborn Down Syndrome child has no rights that can be protected from discriminatory abortion (that is, abortion based on the fact that the child will be born handicapped) is to say that the unborn daughter or son, or the unborn mixed race baby, has no rights and can be killed solely for being the wrong sex or the wrong race.

There is a degree to which the laws are irrelevant, like restrictions on job terminations:  you cannot fire an employee for attending a union organization meeting, or for being homosexual, or for reasons of race or religion–but you can fire an at-will employee for no reason at all, so you simply have to avoid saying that any of these factors led to the decision.  In the same way, a woman can terminate a pregnancy without giving a reason for doing so; she just cannot say that the reason is because of the gender, the race, or the genetic disability of the child.  In practical terms the only thing they limit is our ability to be frank about our motivations.

Even so, these laws force us to face a fundamental aspect of our attitude toward abortion.  Should a mother be able to decide that she wants to abort a child because the child’s medical condition will result in the child having a less than fully normal life?  Does that reflect a reasonable desire to protect the child from its own illness, or is it making a discriminatory value judgment that it would be better not to live than to live with such a handicap?  (How many handicapped-from-birth adults would rather never have been born than have been born handicapped?)  Is it reasonable to say that the health of the mother would be threatened by the birth of a handicapped child in a greater way than it would be by the birth of a normal child, or by an abortion?  If so, is it also reasonable to say that the health of the mother would be threatened by the birth of a daughter when she wanted a son, or a son when she wanted a daughter, or by a mixed-race child instead of a pure-race child?

We have stretched the concept of “health of the mother” far enough that it amounts to “I don’t want a child, and therefore it would be unhealthy for me to have one.”  How much further does it have to stretch to be, “I don’t want a handicapped child,” “a mixed-race child,” “a daughter”?  It seems to me that that is not a very far stretch at all–which means either we have already stretched it too far, or we have to accept that sex-selective abortions, abortions of the genetically handicapped, and race-based abortions are all as good a reason as any other, and do not constitute discrimination against a person, because there is no person here and the mother has been given the power to decide whether there will ever be one.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #9, on the subject of Abolition.

In the abortion debate, the argument against restrictions and regulations of this medical procedure is that they rob women of autonomous control over their own bodies, that they are, in a word, a form of slavery.  Anti-abortionists are portrayed as oppressing women, stripping them of their rights to make decisions about their own bodies, forcing them to bear children and then to be responsible for those children, whether raising them or surrendering them to be raised by someone else.  In the words of Shakespeare’s Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing), “The world must be peopled.”  That, though, does not mean we can enslave women to do the job, whatever Japan’s Liberal Democrats think.

The second statement made is that conservatives claim to care about such children up to the moment they are born, and then all such concern ceases.  Indeed, conservatives are portrayed as callous haters who would prevent a woman from receiving the medical attention she needs to remove a parasite but then do nothing to aid her in the pregnancy or thereafter.

The second answer to this is that this is not actually true.  I have worked with a “Crisis Pregnancy Center”, in the efforts to found and launch it both by lending such meager labor assistance as I could to making the offices functional and in training the first batch of staff and counselors.  Everyone with whom I worked was there to make it possible for women and girls with unexpected pregnancies to carry their babies to term and see to their subsequent care.  That included obstetrical exams and services, teaching in infant and child care, the provision of furniture and clothing and formula and diapers, help with social services, contacts with adoption agencies, counseling concerning the benefits and disadvantages of raising a child versus releasing it for adoption, and more.  There are conservatives on the ground doing exactly what it is charged they are not doing.

However, there is a first answer, and this mention of slavery brought it to my attention.  In the nineteenth century, abolitionists, mostly in the north, wanted to free the slaves.

In retrospect, we know that this emancipation was expensive on every level, with economic and social costs we perhaps are still paying.  In my mind’s ear I can hear the slavery party arguing that northerners want to free the slaves, but don’t want to commit to taking care of them once they are free.  I do not know whether that was true; none of us were there.  What I do know is that the fact (if it was a fact) that abolitionists made no commitment to caring for the freed blacks was a very poor argument against freeing them.  They needed to be helped in rising from poverty, at least in having obstacles removed, but whether or not that was going to happen they first needed to be freed.  So, too, children need to be helped, fed and clothed and of course loved and taught, and mothers need the support of fathers, family, community, nation, and churches, to see that their “unwanted” children are provided with that care.  First, though, they need to be protected from the oppression of having life stripped from them before their breathing has shifted from amniotic fluid to air.  Even if it were true that the people who want to protect their lives before they emerge into the world make no commitment to assisting those lives beyond that moment, to kill them before that emergence on that basis would still be as wrong as, more wrong than, to refuse to free the slaves because no one would help them once they were freed.  Our obligation to help the born is a problem, but it is a separate problem from whether to protect the lives of the unborn.  That freeing the slaves proved to mean economic and social costs thrust upon society for generations to follow was never and would not have been a good argument against freeing the slaves.

Yes, just as it was necessary for those who favored ending the enslavement of the black people also to commit to helping those people integrate into American society, it is necessary for those who favor ending the slaughter of the unborn to commit to helping the born rise to share the prosperity of the nation.  However, just as an unwillingness to make that commitment was not a good excuse not to free the slaves, neither is the uncertainty of our commitment to helping children a valid excuse for continuing to kill them unborn.

In addition to the above-linked piece Liberal Democrats Offend Women Again in the page Discrimination, there are also several related points raised in Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues, particularly in the sections Births and On Negative Population Growth.  A connection between slavery and abortion was also suggested in Was John Brown a Hero or a Villain?  See also mark Joseph “young” web log entries with the same “tags” by following the links.

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #7, on the subject of The Most Persecuted Minority.

Around the world, many groups of people are being deprived of basic human rights–

Persecuted, driven from safe homes, their lives counted as worth less than animals, less than livestock.

One group in particular faces death,

daily, at the hands of those who ought to be there to defend and help them.

Our hands.

Yet these helpless, homeless, defenseless people are deprived of rights,

put to death without a trial.

Routinely.  Uncaringly.

Even in America.

As if they were not human at all.  As if they were livestock, or pests, or parasites.

They are the unborn.  They are being exterminated.

Defend the rights of the most helpless minority.  You were once one of them.

This article is perhaps a response to my own article, The Republican Dilemma, in which I suggest that Republicans need to create ads which explain and defend Republican/conservative positions that will make sense to people not already holding those views.  This is a suggested model for one such ad, a sixty-second television spot.

Earlier M. J. Young Net articles addressing abortion include Was John Brown a Hero or a Villain? and Professor Robert Lipkin, the Concert Violinist, and Abortion.  Also see Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues:  Births and Miscellaneous Marriage Law Issues:  On Negative Population Growth, incidentally related topics.

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