In the land where the "perfect" becomes the enemy of the good
Patricia Bauer writes about her beloved child Margaret, who happens to have Down's Syndrome:
... At a dinner party not long ago, I was seated next to the director of an Ivy League ethics program. In answer to another guest's question, he said he believes that prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo prenatal testing and to terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth a child with a disability, because it was immoral to subject a child to the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure. (When I started to pipe up about our family's experience, he smiled politely and turned to the lady on his left.)
Margaret does not view her life as unremitting human suffering (although she is angry that I haven't bought her an iPod). She's consumed with more important things, like the performance of the Boston Red Sox in the playoffs and the dance she's going to this weekend. Oh sure, she wishes she could learn faster and had better math skills. So do I. But it doesn't ruin our day, much less our lives. It's the negative social attitudes that cause us to suffer.
Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had "the test." I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I'm a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved. If yes, then it means I'm a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren't relevant to their lives.
Either way, they win.
Read the whole thing.
... At a dinner party not long ago, I was seated next to the director of an Ivy League ethics program. In answer to another guest's question, he said he believes that prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo prenatal testing and to terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth a child with a disability, because it was immoral to subject a child to the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure. (When I started to pipe up about our family's experience, he smiled politely and turned to the lady on his left.)
Margaret does not view her life as unremitting human suffering (although she is angry that I haven't bought her an iPod). She's consumed with more important things, like the performance of the Boston Red Sox in the playoffs and the dance she's going to this weekend. Oh sure, she wishes she could learn faster and had better math skills. So do I. But it doesn't ruin our day, much less our lives. It's the negative social attitudes that cause us to suffer.
Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had "the test." I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I'm a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved. If yes, then it means I'm a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren't relevant to their lives.
Either way, they win.
Read the whole thing.
posted by Kate Marie | 1:17 PM | Permalink
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4 comments
4 Comments:
I appreciate you linking to this. My cousin had Down's, autism, and epilepsy, and it was impossible to know where one syndrome ended and the others began. She often made life extremely difficult for her parents and brother, and it'd be dishonest of me to pretend otherwise; she also challenged many of us in her extended family as well.
That said, she suffered no more than any other kid, and in some ways probably much less. She was loved by many people, and like any other kid, she bonded with her aunts, uncles, cousins, and especially her grandparents. She was much more inscrutable than the average person, but she had hobbies, likes and dislikes, and--although she was incapable of sharing her jokes with us--an obviously bawdy sense of humor. When she died suddenly in 2003 at the age of 28, her family, friends, and teachers were all shocked and saddened, and it was probably at that time that some of them most strongly wished that she had been born "normal"--but there certainly wasn't anyone at the funeral who wished she had never been born.
Jeff, I'm so sorry about your cousin's death. It sounds like she lived a full and happy life as a daughter, sister, granddaughter, niece, and cousin.
That's why I find some of the rhetoric surrounding abortion (or specifically aborting the disabled) so disturbing. Much of it seems to rely on the notion that lives like Bauer's daughter's -- or your cousin's -- are not worth living.
We have friends who recently had a daughter born with Down's syndrome. They had "the test," so I'm sure they would be considered right-wing anti-abortion nuts by some of the young women Bauer mentions. They gave her a name (which I won't mention here, since I don't have their permission) which was meant to remind them that "everything God makes is good." She is not their problem or their cross to bear (though, as you say, some kids can be more a lot more "challenging" than others). She's their daughter, whom they dearly love.
In the year 6565
Ain't gonna need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube' Whoooa
Peter Singer, a guy who must be much smarter than me -- he's a professor of ethics, after all -- not only thinks it is OK to kill babies before they are born, but says:
Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.
[Source: princeton.edu]
Thank God that Margaret wasn't born to the Singer family.
That was a great article, KM.
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