Society may soon resent parents who choose not to terminate unborn babies with ‘abnormalities’.
The conservativehome.com definition of euthanasia discusses how the legalisation of a right-to-die can become a duty-to-die. The same slippery slope from a right to a duty can be seen with abortion.
Pressures to screen-and-terminate
Technologies cut many ways. 3D and 4D ultrasound technologies can serve pro-life ends by introducing a mother to the recognisable humanity of her unborn baby. Other technologies can increase abortion rates. Amniocentesis can, for example, detect hundreds of genetic disorders and often encourage anxious parents to terminate pregnancies.
A decision to abort a foetus is still a private choice in the world’s free nations. But will this change? The social pressures on parents to screen-and-terminate ‘imperfect’ unborn children are likely to grow and grow. The reasoning is easy to forsee:
”That couple at number nine have just had a Downs syndrome baby”.
“So I heard. Didn’t they get it scanned in the womb? Doctors could have told them that it wasn’t normal.”
“The doctors probably told them but they must have been desperate for a baby.
They must be selfish or mad. My taxes are high enough already without having to pay for someone else’s disabled child. Doctors should have made them get rid of it.”
Such discriminatory and materialistic social attitudes will form pressure number one. Pressure two will come from insurers who will want to charge higher premiums to families that refuse to abort babies with ‘special’ future needs. Pressure three will be from government. It will become illegal for parents to have children that place disproportionate burdens on the NHS and Britain’s schools.
Children with defects = parental failings
Pressures two and three may not yet be on the public agenda but we should be on our guard against their emergence. The US Commission on Bioethics has already warned:
"Although, at least in the United States, the practice of screening and elimination is likely to remain voluntary, its growing use could have subtly coercive consequences for prospective parents and could increase discrimination against the “unfit.” Children born with defects that could have been diagnosed in utero may no longer be looked upon as “Nature’s mistakes” but as parental failings."
Abortion and parent-child relations
Gilbert Meilaender has also wondered how a failure to exercise the ‘choice to abort’ will affect relations between a handicapped child and his or her parents. In Things That Count he writes:
”No longer need children hold God responsible for the cruel joke life has played on them. The culprit will be nearer to hand. The old problem of theodicy – justifying the ways of God in our world – will have to be applied to parents. The child whose life of pain or disability might have been avoided by abortion might learn to reason thus:
‘If my parents have the power to keep me from living such a life, and if they really loved me, they would not let me endure this. But I am enduring it, and they had it within their power to abort me. They must not really love me.’
To exercise godlike control over one’s child – to learn to think of the bond as purely chosen and willed – is to risk becoming the object of such reasoning.”
In the age of factory children some ‘natural’ children may start to resent their primitivism. Equally, engineered children might resent their commodification.
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