Choosy Moms Choose Selective Abortion

Wow, that was crass. But this is something that I feel pretty strongly about, as it relates to women's reproductive choice. Garland-Thompson's Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory touched on the subject of selective abortion, citing a source that seen it as "a coercive form of genocide against the disabled." That's a pretty bold statement. As I am not in the strictest sense disabled, I am probably fairly biased in my belief that selective abortion is an okay thing. Of course, like all grey issues, there are some lines that shouldn't be crossed--selective abortion of females in India is actually not okay. The problem with line-drawing, however, is how the lines get decided and who decides them.

When dealing with severe mental disabilities, you have to consider that not only will the child in question be affected, but you, your family and Uncle Sam will as well. Even though it can be argued that you can't prenatally determine quality of life, you CAN determine your own social and economic standing to assess your ability to properly care for a special needs child. In no way am I suggesting that mentally or physically disabled people can't live fulfilling lives; I'm just pointing to important and apparently overlooked facts to consider when bringing another human being into the world.

Arguments against selective abortion describe it as eugenics. Which, honestly, I don't see as that bad of a thing. With all the medical technology available nowadays, natural selection has been placed on the back burner of society. Just to clarify that I'm not that big of an asshole, what I have in mind right now are artificial methods of preserving life. Talkin' Terri Schaivo here. Social Security was not meant to provide for people living into their eighties and nineties, and the burden of providing for their care is going to cripple the system (I'm talking to you, baby boomers). I think there's a definate connection between anti-choicers and anti-let-suffering-old-people-diers in that the life and death cycle become unnatural. The Catholic Church is all "from conception to natural death!!1!" but with modern technology, death isn't natural anymore. Unless you get run over or something. With so much technology to prolong life, there's less of an emphasis on death as an inevitability. I mean, yes there is, but not as an immediate kind of thing, and the likelihood of women dying in childbirth nowadays is much less than way back when.

So I've kind of been all over the place, but what I'm trying to articulate here is that the cultural anxiety of controlling and regulating death is what people are making a fuss about, because it's taking the control out of the hands of society and into individuals' hands. And since individuals inevitably have different ideologies and values, there's a lot more grey as opposed to your cut-and-dry 'abortion is bad because it kills babies and gives you breast cancer' arguments.