ProWomanProLife

…doctors may not tell you. Last night I saw a documentary on Rock Center about women from North Carolina that were unknowingly sterilized in the 1960s. While it was heartbreaking to hear each woman recount her experience and the loss of her ability to conceive, it was the stories of women who were told they were being sterilized but were not fully aware of what that meant that haunted me. The doctors spoke in terminology those young girls didn’t understand, but the outcomes were irreversible. I imagine there are many parallels between these stories and those of women who have undergone abortions, the women felt “butchered” and violated.

A young man with Down’s was on the ferry from the Toronto Island airport this past weekend. He was excited to get off first and had positioned himself accordingly. But then he let me go before him with a smile, in a kind of chivalric gesture. It was one of those nice, if small, moments in a busy city.

I already get choked up when I see people with Down Syndrome, knowing as I do that we don’t see as many of them as we should.

Not going to get any better now.

I get shivers watching this. Holy powerful communications through a well done video. Jarring. And I’m not even sure that I agree with it. (Planned Parenthood is evil, don’t get me wrong, but I think they want anyone and everyone to have ”access to abortion,” not just black people. That said, the numbers don’t lie, and more black women are having abortions. And so that is worth addressing and doing some PR on, especially within the black community. I’m just not sure this is a race issue.)  

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Andrea adds: Here’s another clip from the same group. Note the different tone. Note also that it has about 300 views compared with 20,000 plus for the other one.

When I studied bioethics, the topic of addicted mothers — especially of the pregnant variety — was the issue  to polarize a group. Check this one out:

Project Prevention. It pays money to drug addicts so they can be sterilized. Should we be shocked? I don’t know. Call me disillusioned but we’ve been able to remove ourselves from the gene pool for quite some time now. Is getting a financial reward to do so any worse? The slope isn’t that slippery at the bottom. As far as I can read, the state is not paying people to be sterilized. Nor is the state deciding who should get paid to have it zipped.

All in all, much ado about nothing. Not to mention that sterilizing males does nothing to prevent the birth of drug-addicted babies.

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Andrea adds: “The slope isn’t that slippery at the bottom,” is a good point, Véronique. While I may not be shocked, I am dismayed that rather than curtail sexual behaviour, we’d rather all run out and get ourselves sterilized. There’s something upside down about that. But then again, I’m pro-life. I think it’s upside down to consider aborting as a solution to anything at all. Very backwards, I know.

In my youth, when the new reproductive technologies were still new, I remember hearing the argument that surrogacy and certain other forms of reproductive technology would lead to the “commodification of children.”  The people discussing the issue seemed interested in that viewpoint in a academic sort of way, but most people did not seem to find that abstract risk a compelling enough reason not to allow people to realize their cherished dream of children.  We certainly wouldn’t want to tell people what they should or should not do.

Which lead us to where we are now - parents pressuring a surrogate to abort a baby following a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome.  “The child is seen by the commissioning parents as a product, and in this case a substandard product because of a genetic condition,” said Prof. Francoise Baylis, a bioethicist at Dalhousie University.  No kidding.

So, that is what the commodification of children means in practice  – a child in utero is branded a “substandard product” of which the consumer refuses to delivery.

Contrast this impoverished view of humanity and human relationship with that of this parent of a “defective” child.  This article was written in response to the televised comments of a British advice columnist stating that “it was better to terminate a pregnancy than to condemn a disabled or unwanted child to a lifetime of emotional or physical suffering”.  But that’s another eugenics story.

Sigh.

Well, not quite. But this morning the medical minute on my local radio station (Ottawa’s 580 CFRA) was the Mayo Clinic announcing that parents can have tests done even earlier and less invasively for Down Syndrome. It’s effective, they say, 85 per cent of the time and allows parents to prepare and “make decisions.”

Given that we know that 90 per cent of Downs babies are aborted, what do you think “make decisions” means in this case?

Abortion takes the lives of blacks disproportionately. And reported in The Times, no less. All the very horrifying news that’s fit to print:

Abortion opponents say the number is so high because abortion clinics are deliberately located in black neighborhoods and prey upon black women. The evidence, they say, is everywhere: Planned Parenthood’s response to the anti-abortion ad that aired during theSuper Bowl featured two black athletes, they note, and several women’s clinics offered free services — including abortions — to evacuees after Hurricane Katrina.

A friend draws attention to this (apparently left-wing/libertarian) argument against assisted suicide and euthanasia. I’m not sure I see what’s left-wing or libertarian about it, but OK, it’s still early in the day, there’s still some hope for me. It’s not an uninteresting piece, except for this part, which made me jump out of my chair some:

But the problem arises when campaigners call upon society not only passively to accept that these acts of humanity take place, but actively to welcome them, to sanction them, even to celebrate them. Gosling and some of his supporters in the assisted suicide lobby say they want to bring these acts ‘into the open’, to raise awareness about them, and to encourage society to create new rules outlining when it is acceptable to help end someone’s life. But such acts do not belong ‘in the open’. If society were to legalise assisted suicide, it would send the very profound message that death is an acceptable solution to life’s trials and traumas. At a social level, it would elevate hopelessness and fatalism above the cultural affirmation of living, loving, fighting for another day, week, month or year.

Not sure on which planet this fellow lives, but down here it so happens that death has already been declared an acceptable solution to life’s trials and traumas.

I was going to say in response to this article that if we stopped using euphemisms, then this mother wouldn’t be forced to field terrible, offensive questions. Her son has Downs Syndrome, and other parents apparently have the audacity to ask: Why didn’t you get prenatal testing? Which is the same as asking Why didn’t you abort the fetus? Which is the same as asking Why didn’t you kill your child?

Now most of us feel that’s not the way we want our culture to go, but not, apparently everyone. Check the Globe’s comment section. The discussion quickly becomes one of the burden  Downs children place on all of us, and how they would be better off dead. We all would be really, because the cost of treating them and educating them is high.

So this mother (and parents of children of varying abilities everywhere) need all the support they can get. Because she’ll be fielding the “why didn’t you kill your child?” question for some time to come.

(Filed under our “eugenics” category.)

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Patricia adds: My daughter is five years old and I still get the “did you know she had DS” question. It’s especially disheartening when it comes from a medical professional; I always wonder if what they’re really asking me is whether I want her treated or would I prefer that she go quietly into that good night?

The comments section of the Globe piece was similarly disheartening. Even assuming that people with Down Syndrome impose a higher cost on the public purse, I always thought that, as a society, we were supposed to care for the “weak”. Isn’t “helping widows and orphans” the irrebuttable argument in favour of taxation? Isn’t that what the public purse is for? I realize I have a vested interest in this point of view, but wouldn’t you rather your tax money go to speech therapy or a special education teacher for a child with Down Syndrome or autism than to any number of half-baked government schemes that it is routinely poured into by the bucketful?

But I’m not even prepared to concede “high cost to society” argument. My law school education was heavily subsidized and I’m not sure exactly what obvious benefit to society that provided. I suspect the same could be said of many other highly subsidized higher educations. My daughter won’t be draining the public purse for that purpose. She won’t be seeking a massive bail-out of her automobile company. Nor will she be seeking billions of dollars for wind-power development.

She is however highly functional and industrious, even at five. (You should see her scrub floors.) Everyone who meets her, loves her. (Admittedly, she’s five; not many five year olds aren’t likeable.) She turns the rough and tumble little boys in her class into gentle caregivers – when she’s not playing dragon with them. She says “hi” to the old man having coffee by himself at the next table at the local cafe. I’m guessing she brings some joy to the cashier at our local No Frills because that cashier always makes a point of coming over to talk to her. I don’t know what she’ll end up doing, but I suspect her net contribution to society will be far greater than that of most people so niggardly in their view of life that it would even occur to them to ask how she came to see the light of day.

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Véronique adds: Patricia, your post about the public purse and the potential of people with DS reminded me of a newspaper ad I cut out to show my bioethics students. It showed a boy with Down Syndrome and the caption was (paraphrasing): “He will probably never be Prime Minister or cure cancer. But neither will you.”

Another great column on what exporting abortions abroad is really about:

“Population control,” through the United Nations or otherwise, has always consisted of “breeding instructions for the blacks, browns, and yellows.” And this is precisely what Ignatieff is selling, to the sort of people who want to buy it.

So when we talk maternal health, let’s talk maternal health. It is cultural imperialism of the very worst kind to take some Harvard-educated feminist’s mantra of “my body, my choice” and export it to cultures where they don’t think of killing their unborn babies as a solution to problems.