THINKING ABOUT THE ULTIMATE WEDGE ISSUE: This is one of the most powerful commentaries on abortion I've ever read. It aligns closely with my own feelings. Make sure to check it out.
Andrew Sullivan suggests it aligns with his feelings, too, although says he'd favor legal abortions in the first trimester to "protect a woman's ownership of her own body." I tend to agree with him.
10.18.2005
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12 comments:
Wow. This woman is right on. Just wait until my wife sets her eyes on this one.
(Tough one to get through with dry eyes)
"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."
and the writer says this like it's bad? why not have the choice to use technology to rule out disorders that can be detected in utero?
let's face it: if the writer had a child with an arm growing out of the center of its head and nowhere else, she's still going to love that child and say she's feisty and wants her ipod and whatnot. even thought it's no one else's business if you elect to knowingly bring a disabled child to term, prenatal screenings don't guarantee a healthy "perfect" child.
Due to a very visceral experience from my childhood, I had strong opinions about this subject when Sarah and I were discussing the "what ifs" during her pregnancy.
There was an old woman in my synagogue when I was a kid. She had a child with moderate-to-severe down's syndrome. The child (middle-aged) had the mental capacity of a 3-year-old. For years, I watched this mother try to keep up with/care for her daughter as they both aged. I watched the mother get older and slower, and spend more and more of her energy caring for her child instead of the less and less that you're supposed to spend as you both grow older. I watched the mother become more and more powerless to provide the care and comfort that her daughter needed. And finally, I watched this mother die, and the middle-aged woman - who only understood that mommy was never coming back - scream and cry and be taken away to a group home.
I did not want that to be my life. I did not want that to be how my child's life ended.
I agree, Trisha. That's pretty much the fundamental thing for me. Whether or not I believe there's a god, I know it's not my place to presume to be Him. I feel that very deeply. Which pretty much explains how I feel abortion is wrong, but I wouldn't want to legislate it out of existence.
I remember a scary episode in college where I thought a girl I was dating was pregnant. My first thought was, well, maybe we'll get an abortion. It seemed very socially acceptable. Looking back, I'm not sure it should have seemed that way. Luckily, she was not pregnant. Who knows what we would have done if she had been. I knew plenty of friends who had abortions. As far as I know, none of them came through the process unscathed in one way or another.
Great article. Thanks for posting. I never understood the women (many of them my good friends) who had a battery of tests on their unborn child. As far as I can tell, the only reason to have them is to be able to decide weather or not you want to abort. If you know that's not an option for you, why do all the testing?
Moral obligation to get the testing!!!!! Is this guy nuts? There is no such obligation. Your only obligation is to live with the decision you make and love and raise your child.
What if your child becomes disabled AFTER birth? Let's say, your 1 year old has a terrible accident and will never be the same? Sounds like some people would think you should kill it, put it out of it's misery. I mean, if you're going to kill an unborn child just because it has tested positive for possible Down-Syndrom, why not shoot a lethal dose of saline into the brain-damaged 1 year old? Do you see where this is headed?
Also, where does it stop? Some people don't want a Down-Syndrom baby. Well, hell, what if I don't want a baby that is going to have chronic ear infections? What about when technology allows us to test in-utero for diabetes, arthritis, and asthma? Hell, just abort 'em all...
Sickening.
L.
As I said, my soft spoken wife will not be denied.
(And as well written as that last post was, I know there were a few winces at "weather"- consider it a signature in every post)
Well done, Laurel.
Trisha asked, 'Who are we, any of us, to imagine the quality of anther's life?' We all do, and all of us must, to cope. And as Scott's post about CJ illustrates as much as Issac's comments here, as parents we certainly imagine the quality of of child's life. Why be a parent if you don't? How do you parent if you don't?
But to judge, whic is really the issue, well, as Issac pointed out, we must all be our own personal judge as well. Personally, I find the Ivy league 'moral obligation to test' guy contemptible. But I also understand it. Having an autistic uncle who lives a full life, but also knowing the challenges to our family to support that, I can understand the position. If a child of special needs were born into ther Hess family, from what little I know of anyone, even Scott, I'm confident that the child would have the benefit of a loving, informed, intelligent, resourceful and commited family, both immediate and extended. I don't have to imagine what such a child's life can be like, because I've seen many variations through my uncle's life. And like Issac, I've seen alternatives. The worst, for me, has been seeing people, people like my uncle, homeless on the street. Those moment tear at my heart precisely because I can imagine a better life for that person andit pains me that we as a society cannot provide that efficiently or broadly enough when families are unable to do so themselves.
The disapproval the mother/author felt is disappointing. But the freedom of choice is only that, and if we choose to support such freedom we are under a broad obligation to accept, if not entirely respect, the 'wrong' choice. Whatever we hold that to be.
Well articulated, Kev, as always. Still...is it really our place to spin plates on the slippery moral slope of judging another's quality of life? We do have absolutes in our society, in our laws. One of them is, no killin' unless you're engaged in military or police business (or, in some cases, self defense). We rally around that one, as a society, right? So it seems like it always gets back to, is abortion killing...or not? If it is, when exactly does it become killing...at conception, or at delivery? Etc. If, on the other hand, setting the killing argument aside for a second, we judge that freedom of choice is the prevailing value, the highest of all highs, then can we at least draw a line, as Sullivan suggests, at the first trimester? Even as I type that I question whether that could ever work...
By the way, I totally realize I'm posting on both sides of the fence here. I'm not trying to advance my politics (which, on this and most issues, are muddled and works in progress) as much as I am trying to advance this conversation.
Isaac, I keep going back to your post and wondering: Are you saying the mother would have been better off if she had aborted her daughter? The daughter would have been better off? The congregants at the synagogue? To eliminate the suffering in life, we'd have to eliminate all life. If, in order to be worthy of space on the planet, we need to be able to take care of ourselves in adulthood, there are many more abortions needed. Heck, one could argue that I myself was a borderline case for the first few years after college...
Seriously, though, as much as there's pain and suffering in the story you write about and observed as you grew up, what does it really have to do with whether or not abortion is just, moral, etc.?
And...I think Trisha's question wasn't "who can judge whether another's life is fun or not fun," but "who can judge whether or not another's life is WORTH LIVING." Big difference.
Well, I didn't say it was an intellectual reaction. I said it was visceral :)
Growing up with that woman and her child, I always got the impression that the mother's life was extremely challenging and sad. Not sure, of course whether that was correct. But to the 7-year-old isaac, it sure looked awful - especially when the mother would just break down and cry in front of everyone when she couldn't control her daughter.
I guess, my thinking was that a life is more than a beating heart in a 12-week-old fetus. A full life is built from the first second that we directly interact with the outside world. The fetus is also a life, but it's one with more promise than actuality. And to save that promise of a life only to kill off potential for a happy existence in Sarah's and my golden years - to damage our actual lives, and to have that promise of a life end up when we died like the downs-syndrome daughter did when her mother died... I felt like if I could save all that pain and suffering, I would do it. It would be tough/horrible, and I would think about it for the rest of my life, but I would do it. And I wouldn't want a protracted legal battle to stand in my way.
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