I must preface this post with the statement that I am staunchly pro-choice but I must admit that there are certain aspects of the pro-choice movement that make me very uneasy. Today there was a post on the main page discussing how Poland had been chastised for refusing genetic testing to a woman whose fetus may have been malformed. As I said in my direct comment to that posting I applaud international support for abortion rights but as a disabled person cannot condone the use of possible congenital disabilities as a valid reason to support abortion access.
Feministing in general does a wonderful job of supporting disability right as a whole and especially as they relate to the women’s movement. For this reason it is all the more shocking that a Feministing contributor would say directly that the choice of abortion is always to left to the woman regardless of reasoning. In fairness Jos does mention that there are issues surrounding this reasoning but she does in the end save the choice should be up to the woman.
Allowing this sort of thinking to continue within the feminist movement can only lead to damaging the disability rights movement. Supporting a woman’s right to choose to abort a disabled fetus that would otherwise have been wanted child allows stigma around disability to grow. In this case I must firmly stand on that future child’s right to the chance of life.
there are already movements (though small ones) that support parents right to choose after the birth of a child whether to euthanize said child if they are born disabled. I do not think that is at all illogical to suppose that if a parent should be allowed to abort a child based on fetal abnormality that said parent if they are not informed before the birth that they should be allowed to euthanize or at least abandon said child on the basis of disability alone.
In addition Feministing has a long history of commenting on India’s major issue of sex selective abortions. In none of the articles found on Feministing that I have read in regards to this issue to the contributors ultimately conclude that it is sad that these female fetuses are being aborted but ultimately it is the mother’s choice after all. On the contrary the contributor usually calls for there to be more work done in raising the status of women in India so that this unfortunate occurrence no longer happens.
The same should be said for fetuses who develop abnormalities be they genetic disorders like down syndrome wer simply a birth defect that results in the loss of a limb. The only exceptions I would find to this necessary movement is that if the malformed child once born were simply going to die regardless of medical intervention.
I do not deny that children with disabilities require extra work and more effort on the part of parents (but to a certain extent so do girls warned families in India). I know that you are not identical in situation but they are not so different that comparisons cannot be drawn. It is for this reason that I call for all Feministing contributors to cease forth with him ever again using the possible disability of a fetus as a reason to support abortion rights.
10 Comments
I agree that this shouldn’t be used as a talking point for pro-choice arguments. I don’t know if denying access to abortion is a good thing though, no matter what we think of someone’s reasons. I think there needs to a push towards raising cultural awareness of disability rights and removal of myths and misconceptions about disabilities and people who have them. I think there needs to be a global rethinking of both the ways women/girls are viewed and people with disabilities are viewed societally.
I agree, I would never argue that Poland should completely cut off rights to abortion but rather legalize it so that the problem of using disability as a talking point for abortion can be addressed rather than saying disability is bad reason to allow abortion so it should just be illegal. I applaud the international pressure placed on Poland regarding abortion access
You don’t see a logical difference between allowing abortion of fetuses who would be born with disabilities and allowing euthanasia of infants with disabilities if parents didn’t know in advance? *wince* Let me try to persuade you otherwise.
Embryos and fetuses are generally** inside of someone else; we do not currently have the technology to transfer their care to another person. Infants are not inside of someone else and their care can be transferred to another person without physically harming the parent. This is for many people THE most important difference between a fetus and an infant when it comes to the ethics of legal abortion. This difference is completely independent of disability status.
Pregnancy is not a risk-free process to the pregnant person. (True, neither is abortion, but in the 90′s in the US, eg, pregnancy was 11 times deadlier in terms of case-rate fatalities. And that’s ignoring all the other associated problems — pregnancy doesn’t have to kill you to do you lasting harm.) Even in an ideal world where everyone had access to modern medicine and good nutrition and other things, pregnancy would still carry a risk. A person decide the risk of becoming (or staying) pregnant is acceptable if the outcome is a child with certain traits, but not acceptable if the child has certain other traits.
It may be that in specific cases, a person’s valuing of some traits over others perpetuates *isms in society, but that doesn’t magically erase the fact that pregnancy carries risks.
As for permitting abortion ONLY in the case that the doomed “malformed child”***, where would you draw the line? 50% chance of death in infancy? 90%? 80% chance of living to age 4 but 10% of living to age 5? 80% chance of reaching age 20 but 0% chance of living to age 40? Nature has not conveniently categorized all human fetuses into two bins of “always doomed” and “not doomed at all”, just as not all pregnancy complications can be divided into 100% fatal and Not At All Harmful bins.
**(In vitro embryos are a whole other matter, and not germane to this discussion.)
***(Your wording kind of freaks me out there, and seems a bit strange coming from an anti-ableism advocate. Not all fatal fetal abnormalities result in visible physical malformation — Tay-Sachs, for example.)
Perhaps I did not make myself clear, I am not saying someone with a disabled fetus must carry it to term especially if it risks the mother’s health or the likelyhood of the child surviving are low. I am speaking to the fact that disabled people in modern society are devalued and I don’t think disability in and of itself are necessarily valid reasons to abort because many disabilities do not ccome with death sentences attached to them. I bring up the example of some physicians lobbyig for the active euthenasia of infants with disabilities as an example of just how devalued we really are. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of people living with disabilities today were not born with them but aquired them later in life due to accident or illness. As such a parent is far more likely to give birth to a stereotypically healthy child who later becomes disabled (and options to forgo parenting said child are less available) than giving birth to a child with a congenital or genetic disability. What do you propose the mother who would have aborted her malformed fetus (who could have survived infancy and been healthy outside of disability) because she didn’t feel she could handle it. When this woman’s healthy child falls victim to serious illness or injury which results in a disability? What then? Would it not be better to educate people that disabled people can lead happy healthy lives and that they need not be the burdens that society tells us that they are? Would it not be better for expectant mothers to learn that their children might be born with defects more accurate information so that they can make better more informed decisions? Would it not also be better that the status of disabled people be raised so that we are not constantly perceived as burdens and have support networks in place? Abortion and genetc testing will not stop there being disabled people. We make up the world’s largest visible minority after all.
Okay, I think I understand. Of course it would be better if people with disabilities were less stigmatized in society! And it would be better for there to be adequate support networks for parents of children with disabilities (whether the disabilities exist at birth or occur later in life). And for parents considering abortion to have accurate information about their child’s future. I’m not disagreeing there!
I thought you were arguing against permitting abortion in the case of fetal abnormality, and that allowing abortion in those cases was logically/morally the same as permitting infanticide of infants born with abnormalities. That’s what I was arguing against.
I _do_ also disagree with the idea that we shouldn’t ever mention fetal abnormality (I assume that’s what you mean by malformation? ) as a reason why abortion should remain legal. True, it’s been established that a lot of anti-choicers will make their “it’s okay if it’s me” exception for Down syndrome, and so on some level the argument appeals to ableism. But I believe that we don’t have to perpetuate the ableism so long as we focus on the always-fatal conditions (like Tay Sachs and some of the nastier trisomies).
The problem with this thinking is that who are you to judge someone elses reasons for an abortion???
So, is it valid to abort if you can’t afford the child but it’s not ok if it’s due to a disability? What if the two are intrinsically linked – i.e., a disabled child costs more money.
I personally can’t get behind having an “approved list” of valid reasons to abort or a list of invalid reasons to abort. That’s a slippery slope that leads to no good all around. You can’t go down that route.
If this really concerns you then answer is to help educate the public so that less people will make a choice based on disability, but not to limit their choice or change the absolute message of complete freedom of choice for the mother.
The difference from advocating abortion and advocating euthanasia is the fact that a fetus is not a person. I’m trying to understand your main point, which I believe is that pro-choice narratives shouldn’t revolve around disabled fetuses. But, it sounds kind of like you’re saying all women pregnant with disabled fetuses should be forced to carry the pregnancy, instead of allowing them the choice. I’m going to assume that’s not what you’re trying to say. But the comparison with abortion to euthanasia sounds like you’re saying abortion is murder.
If you would read my responses to other comments you would find that I have clarified my position. I am not attempting to say that a disabled fetus has more rights than the woman carrying it. I bring up the push for euthenasia as a way to illustrate how devalued disabled people are. The reality is that disability in and of itself (not just deadly conditions for the infant or mother) is used as a reason for abortion. This argument has serious implications for disabled people as it can and has been used to imply that life with disability isn’t worth living. As I say in mt post this argument isn’t about whether or not someone should have the right to choose whether or not they want to have a child (which they should) but to bring up the complex problems that arise when people make decisions about what kind of child they want to have. There are of course many reasons that disability might complicate or contribute to a woman’s decision to continue a pregnancy but it should never be the sole reason. Mothers who think they couldn’t cope with a disabled child may end up with one anyway if they give birth to an able bodied child as the majority of disabilities are aquired not congenital or genetic. So promoting disability as a reason on its own for abortion reinforces the idea that raising a disabled child is to hard and that people shouldn’t have to do it when the reality is that in most instances choices aren’t an option because people usually don’t get advance warning that their child is going to succumb to a debilitating illness or be involved in an accident and after it happens those children are still their responsibility and deserve to have iit recognized that their lives have value.
Please understand, i’m not saying that disabled children have no value. I think it’s horrible to euthanize a child for being disabled. But euthanasia shouldn’t be equated with abortion. If you had said in the post that euthanasia is also happening, and it shows how little disabled people are valued (without comparing it to abortion), I wouldn’t have commented on your post. But, you did compare it to abortion, and I still see that as problematic. I didn’t read your responses to the other comments, or the other comments, because I wanted to reply to your post, not the comments.
I agree that abortion arguments should not be made through the disabled fetuses angle. I never disagreed on that. I just don’t think abortion should be compared to euthanasia. I believe my confusion with whether or not you support abortion makes sense, because comparing abortion to murder is a common anti-choice argument.
I do believe disability is the sole reason for an abortion quite often, and in many cases, you’d be right to say this is a problem. But some people can’t afford the care that child might need. They might not know that a healthy child might develop disabilities later, or maybe these same women would give their child up for adoption if the child were to develop a disability.
Anyway, thanks for clearing up your position.
I need to clarify something. I said, maybe these same women would give their child up for adoption. I’m sorry, this perpetuates cis-normative attitudes that only women get abortions. I want to apologize to anyone reading that may be offended. I’m a cis-woman, and while I want to be inclusive, my cis privilege still clouds my judgment in statements sometimes. I’m very sorry to any trans person I might have made feel invisible with my comment.