I hope that you are simply unaware of how incredibly offensive the term “Mongoloid” is. Please don’t use that term, as it is considered insulting and archaic by many Downs Syndrome-affected families. I strongly resent the implication that Downs Syndrome children are “freaks”.
Frankly, if anything is “freakish”, perhaps it’s the strange tendency humans have to be repulsed by those who are different: http://prolife.about.com/newsissues/prolife/library/weekly/aa012900a.htm
The abortion for disability argument disturbs me on the most basic level that we don’t know which groups of people may be considered a “defect” that is better aborted as genetic screening becomes more sophisticated. Someday there will probably be people who consider even benign conditions such as homosexuality to be “genetic defects” (not to mention other possibly genetically-linked traits such as obesity).
Is every life worth living? Maybe, maybe not.
However, I do know that it is NOT a given that a person who is disabled at birth is doomed to suffer. Someone who suddenly becomes blind in mid-life may indeed be depressed about it, because they are so used to thinking of the world in visual terms. Someone who is born blind may have no concept of sight, and therefore not feel they’re being deprived of anything. I’m sure some deaf people would give anything to get back their hearing, but other deaf people consciously CHOOSE not to get a cochlear implant to give them hearing.
Even the abrupt onset of severe disability does not necessarily cause someone to prefer death.
Would my father prefer to have two arms and two legs still? OF COURSE. I certainly wish I could have done something to prevent his disability. But since the only life available to him right now is one where he has one arm and one leg, he’s doing what he can with what he still has. Rather than thinking he would be better off dead, we THANK GOD that he is still alive despite all the health problems he has had.
Life is reversible, death isn’t. If someone truly finds life unbearable, they can always opt to end it on their own terms. There’s no going back after we have ended someone’s life.
Prior to the invention of eyeglasses, near-sighted people probably would have been very disadvantaged in many aspects of life. However, nowadays I doubt most of us would consider a near-sighted person “defective”; just different. Who knows what advances will come along within the lifetime of today’s disabled children to make their lives increasingly “normal”? As everyone who has read the story of Samuel Armas knows, fetal surgery for conditions such as Spina Bifida show great promise.
The issue of using artificial means to sustain life is a separate issue. There is a difference between allowing someone to die and actively killing them. If someone went into a cancer ward and shot all the terminally ill patients, it’s still not acceptable or ethical, even if the victims were going to die soon naturally. Obviously, we can’t possibly save every cancer victim from suffering/dying naturally, but we have an obligation to our fellow humans to not CAUSE their suffering/dying.
Here’s another way of looking at it: I’ll suppose for the sake of argument that being disabled is miserable…even then, abortion may still lead to a net INCREASE of suffering.
After all, as long as abortion is the recommended “cure” for certain conditions, there is little motivation (not to mention less opportunity for researching the condition) to seek genuine cures (gene therapy, medication, etc.).
As a consequence, more and more generations of children with a given disability will be conceived, just to be aborted, when perhaps if the first generation of children with the condition had been allowed to live then science would have been more willing and more able to find ways to alleviate their pain.
Even if you don’t agree that abortion is a loss/suffering to the child (though I question whether it’s really more “peaceful” to be dismembered in utero than allowed to die in the embrace of the family that loves you), I doubt any but the most extreme abortion advocates would deny that aborting a wanted pregnancy causes true grief and pain to the FAMILY of the aborted child. The net result: More suffering, not less.
Also, I believe that the “for the child’s own good” argument fosters an attitude that is ultimately anti-choice (not pro-life, not pro-choice, but pro-abortion). If abortion is a “favor” to the child, then why allow pro-life women to “torture” their fetuses by carrying the pregnancy to term? Why not force/coerce pro-life women to abort? For Their Own Good.
Obviously I don’t truly advocate doing such a thing, but I am afraid that treating abortion as an act of “mercy” to the child is already leading many people to feel they have no right to allow their child to live.
