The ongoing pogrom against babies with Down syndrome continues. In Australia, from whence I recently returned, two couples have sued their doctors for failing to diagnose their then unborn babies as having Down–thereby denying them the right to terminate the pregnancies. From the story:
Two Victorian couples are suing doctors for failing to diagnose Down syndrome in their unborn babies, denying them the chance to terminate the pregnancies. The couples are claiming unspecified damages for economic loss, continuing costs of care of the children, and “psychiatric injury”. Both say they would have aborted their pregnancies had they been told their children would be born with Down syndrome.
May these children never learn that their parents would have preferred that they were never born!
We claim today to be a society steeped in equality and tolerance for differences. But too often, that doesn’t apply to people with cognitive or developmental disabilities. I hope this suit fails because there should be no such thing as a “wrongful life.”
July 20th, 2010 | 12:59 pm
Unfortunately, much of this is because our society REFUSES to include disability within the disability umbrella. Whenever I discuss this issue with eugenic abortion supporters, they say that disability is not part of human diversity, it is a burden upon the individual, and then they drag out the story of a token disabled person they know and/or say they care about to illustrate their point. Thus, couples bring such lawsuits with impunity.
July 20th, 2010 | 1:00 pm
Excuse me, I meant “diversity umbrella.”
July 20th, 2010 | 2:25 pm
I have a one-word solution for “parents” like this – ADOPTION.
July 20th, 2010 | 3:20 pm
Safepres: I know this is not a very politically correct thing to say – but a “disability” is by definition something negative. Individuals with disabilities are, of course, just as “human” as individuals without them and may lead lives of equal or greater significance but it is difficult to see how “disability” itself may be included under the “diversity umbrella”.
If a drug administered during pregnancy caused congenital malformations (or specifically caused Down’s syndrome) we would expect the drug company involved to pay out huge sums in compensation – and this makes sense only because we accept that a disability is actually something undesirable (something we would avoid if it were within our power to do so). This doesn’t mean we love the children any less -it just means we don’t pretend that their disability is actually a good thing.
With regard to Down’s syndrome (which, the image informs me, “is not a disease”):
—–
Wesley’s post is, of course, about something rather different. The doctors involved were not responsible for the child’s disability – they just failed to diagnose it during early pregnancy.
I have to admit that I find the very concept of “wrongful life” suits profoundly disturbing and wonder how any parent who claims to truly love their child could comfortable bring a case to court on these terms. I choose to believe (because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt) that this couple truly love this child, are currently overwhelmed financially and are seeking to extract a huge compensatory payout from the hospital to make their child’s life as comfortable and fulfilling as possible. Someday in the future they might have to sit down with their daughter and explain their actions (assuming her cognitive deficits are not severe enough to obviate the need for this) but I guess they’ll cross that bridge when they come to it.
July 20th, 2010 | 3:39 pm
” Both say they would have aborted their pregnancies had they been told their children would be born with Down syndrome.
May these children never learn that their parents would have preferred that they were never born!”
That may not actually be the case. Having a child with Down’s Syndrome results in a great deal of long-term expense, and not everyone has the resources of, say, Sarah Palin. If these folks are trying to get some financial relief, they don’t have much choice but to make these statements if they want to win their lawsuits.
If they’re not in loving homes, by all means I’d prefer to see them adopted out, but frankly most prospective parents are not looking for handicapped children. (Those that are, have my admiration.) Usually such children are institutionalized, or at best put in temporary foster homes.
July 20th, 2010 | 3:51 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys and Stand In The Gap, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: Search and Destroy Mission Against Down Babies: Wrongful Life Lawsuit in OZ » Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog http://shar.es/mV71g [...]
July 20th, 2010 | 4:47 pm
padcraig:
Again the point is not that the Down syndrome makes the person vulnerable to many diseases and that can lead to increased medical bills.
The point is, the parents were ready to kill their child because he/she had a Down syndrome. This is so profound lack of love and compassion it’s very, very hard to grasp.
True, I too admire parents who want to adopt Down syndrome babies. This should be among the options for the mother if she is unwilling or unable to raise her own child. Eugenic abortion with the idea that “the child is better off dead” is just revolting, and should be called as that.
July 20th, 2010 | 5:42 pm
Markus, it’s not just the medical bills. Most Down Syndrome adults need group home environments and become effectively wards of the state. But yeah, there are typically health problems, like early onset Alzheimers’, heart problems, etc. etc.
At the time my younger sister was born with Down Syndrome (1967) the choice was not abort/don’t abort, it was institutionalize/don’t institutionalize. Fortunately we had the resources to raise her at home.
I’m glad for that decision, but I’m not going to force it on women who may not have the support that my mother had.
July 20th, 2010 | 9:23 pm
Safepres: I know this is not a very politically correct thing to say – but a “disability” is by definition something negative. Individuals with disabilities are, of course, just as “human” as individuals without them and may lead lives of equal or greater significance but it is difficult to see how “disability” itself may be included under the “diversity umbrella”.
Raven-I have a disability and I am proud of it. If I could take a medication to make it go away, I wouldn’t do it. Why? Because God, the universe, nature, or what have you, made me the way that I am, and I shouldn’t have to change that because of how our society conceptualizes ability. Disability is, in itself, a social construct. For instance, ADD is a disability, but it is also a different way of experiencing the world and a different neurological wiring, so to speak. Why should people with ADD have to be like everyone else? There’s nothing “wrong” with having ADD, it’s only “bad” because of how our educational system is structured.
Frankly, the position that disability is not a form of diversity is what helps keep disabled people bound in oppression by those who cloak their bigotry in compassion by promoting infanticide, wrongful birth lawsuits, and euthanasia, not to mention lack of accessability. I STRONGLY suggest that you read literature on disability studies, such as Joseph Shapiro’s “No Pity” or “The Disability Studies Reader” to obtain a better grasp of disability as a diversity issue.
July 21st, 2010 | 2:27 am
safepres: Some disabilities are social constructs in that they are impairments which manifest themselves only because our societies are structured in certain ways. This doesn’t change that fact that they are impairments. Radical alteration of the rest of society is not usually an option open to us.
Most disabilities however are far less socially determined. It is possible to argue that a child born deaf, blind or limbless is only considered disabled “because of the way society is structured” but that point of view is totally at variance with what we know about biology and the daily tasks of living.
I’m glad to hear that your disability is for you a source of strength rather than a difficulty which you daily overcome. I may not have a disability myself but I do have several cousins (with different conditions). They are all much loved members of the family, living fulfilling lives – but not one of them would count their disability as a positive thing. They’re not ashamed of their conditions (and neither are we) but they are not proud of them either (how could they be? I am not, for instance, “proud” of the colour of my skin or the length of my limbs). You may be understandably gratified by all you have managed to achieve in spite of your disability but to claim that the impairment itself represents something worth having, something you would gladly bestow on a younger unaffected generation is to take things a bit too far.
I hope I haven’t been insensitive. When I made statements about not including disabilities under the “diversity umbrella” it wasn’t because I hadn’t read the relevant articles. I am aware of the arguments. I just disagree with them. Some people with disabilities require a great deal of support and assistance, a whole plethora of interventions and specialist involvement which they only get when their condition is properly classified as something which requires not merely benign acceptance (“ah, here’s a variant of God’s wonderful Creation”) but active assistance (“here is a valuable person who might have specific difficulties functioning in daily life”).
July 21st, 2010 | 6:54 am
MArkus: You wrote: “The point is, the parents were ready to kill their child because he/she had a Down syndrome.”
It sounds very “right-to-life dramatic,” but they were not ready to “kill their child;” they were ready to abort a pregnancy that would have had potentially destructive results. They would have done so had their doctor not neglected to diagnose it and report it to them. The doctor’s failure may have been unintentional or it may have been intentional and an “act of conscience,” but either way he has committed malpractice by departing from acceptable standards of medical care. Wesley may feel good making a big philosophical thing out of a simple malpractice case, but if you stop to think about it, it’s really silly to read too much into it.
Safepres says: “I have a disability and I am proud of it. If I could take a medication to make it go away, I wouldn’t do it. Why? Because God, the universe, nature, or what have you, made me the way that I am.”
I won’t suggest what the disability might be that she’s so proud of, because Wesley will probably kick me off his website altogether. Suffice it to say, with an attitude like hers we might as well abandon medical research altogether. Perish the thought that we might try to “improve on nature” because, as we all know, “God, the universe, nature or what have you” NEVER make mistakes. In the immortal words of Gilbert & Sullivan:
“What never?
“No, never.
“What never?
“Well… hardly ever….”
July 21st, 2010 | 10:20 am
“they were not ready to “kill their child;” they were ready to abort a pregnancy”
You can’t be serious. Do you really think that verbal gymnastics changes the reality of the situation? The end of “aborting a pregancy” is a dead child. Call it chasing the magical unicorns if you want, but it doesn’t alter that fact.
July 21st, 2010 | 10:51 am
HW, I think you’re being a bit harsh on safepres. I know that deaf (hearing-impaired?) people value their own culture, and some who have had hearing restored after years of deafness have had trouble assimilating. I’ve also heard similar things about people getting sight restored, who don’t know how to process all this visual data they’re now receiving.
Plus, pride in one’s identity is rarely a bad thing. It helps one deal with the negative side effects of one’s birthright, and we ALL have those…
July 21st, 2010 | 11:24 am
HW,
The science is such that when one “aborts a pregnancy” a human organism which is an offspring of the parents dies.
The definition of kill is to cause an organism to die.
The word most commonly used for human offspring is child.
Ergo, the science is such that when one “aborts a pregnancy” a child is killed.
July 21st, 2010 | 2:22 pm
Christina, all you’ve done is illustrate why science is different from propaganda. This isn’t about word games.
If you want to talk science, then bear in mind that only about 24% of natural human fertilizations result in a living baby. (It goes up to 26-28% for IVF, ironically enough.) Most of the terminations are natural miscarriages, and many are not noticed by the woman except as heavy menstrual flow.
For the sake of sanity we don’t treat these sad but commonplace occurrences as having the same impact as the death of a child who beat the odds and was carried to term.
The experience of an interrupted pregnancy is bad enough without resorting to histrionics.
July 21st, 2010 | 4:59 pm
padraig: Now there’s an example I can relate to. As someone who suffers from advanced nerve deafness, and as an amateur musician who now finds it increasingly difficult to play chamber music with his friends because of it, I fail to see anything in the least edifying about hearing loss. I happen to wear a hearing aid in each ear. Does safepres’ “let Nature alone, that’s the way things are” attitude extend to wearing hearing aids — which, after all, “improve on God’s work.” You know, there’s a reason they call these things “handicaps.”
Lauren and Christina: sorry, but when one aborts a pregnancy a FETUS is killed, anti-choice propaganda and limited knowledge of English notwithstanding. If a fetus is a child, then a pile of steel at the Honda plant is a car, a blank canvas a masterpiece and a bottle of gin a martini.
July 21st, 2010 | 5:06 pm
Actually, I consider prenatal death exactly equal to postnatal death. A human being is dead in either case, nothing histrionic about that fact.
July 21st, 2010 | 9:18 pm
Lauren, let me know if you still feel that way after experiencing a 6-week miscarriage, a full-term still birth, the death of a young child, and the death of a young adult with a child of his own.
July 21st, 2010 | 10:24 pm
Padraig, the only difference in those situation is the length of time you’ve known each. I mourned far more for the children I lost to miscarriage than I did for my paternal grandfather whom I hardly knew.
That doesn’t mean that one was more human than the other.
July 22nd, 2010 | 10:34 am
Lauren: “I mourned far more for the children I lost to miscarriage than I did for my paternal grandfather whom I hardly knew.”
Of course you did, and my sympathies for your losses.
Lauren: “That doesn’t mean that one was more human than the other.”
I didn’t say they were. I said they have different impacts because we feel a greater loss based on how great an attachment we have formed.
You didn’t say (and it’s none of my business) whether you have had a complete successful pregnancy, but in any case you have my best wishes for all the babies you want. I have a female relative who went through similar ordeals and she is now expecting her third child.
July 22nd, 2010 | 10:11 pm
All of us begin as one distinct genetic cell, all of us progress through the fullness of time to become the people we are today.
It is callous to abort children because they fail to be genetically perfect. Having a Down Syndrome child may be expensive down the line, but it may not. We should not be a people or a population that destroys people because they may be expensive down the line.
As a side note: many people who have Down Syndrome are able to go on to have paying jobs, live in group homes or independently with minimal assistance.
Having a son with Down Syndrome, he did have heart disease, he may yet have health issues we must contend with, but he is invaluable to our family as a whole, and that 90% of all children like him are obliterated because we can know their genetic make up before they are born, is nothing short of horrific.
July 25th, 2010 | 9:29 pm
I feel for these parents, because I feel very strongly that I’d rather choose abortion than to have a child with Down syndrome.
People have full rights to know anything they request to know about their foetus, so they can make an informed choice about continuing with the pregnancy. If a doctor fails to provide such information, or provides inaccurate information, I fully endorse legal repercussions on that doctor.
July 25th, 2010 | 9:54 pm
Also, on the topic of wrongful life, I believe in this as a concept but I don’t think it rightly applies here. Down syndrome is not something I’d wish my child to have, but I don’t think it’s wrong to have a child with Down syndrome.
There are, however, some disorders which are severe enough that it would be wrong to allow a child to be born (or to continue living) with such. Any disease which results in permanent (i.e. incurable) severe and intense pain would qualify.
July 26th, 2010 | 7:03 am
[...] Secondhand Smoke: Two Victorian couples are suing doctors for failing to diagnose Down syndrome in their unborn [...]
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