The "Disappearance" of Down Syndrome Kids

Great Debates
41

I agree that abortion should be free. Other options should also be available and equally free, which is not the case in, for example, the USA. Sex education should exist and not be restricted to “if you touch yourself your peepee will fall off!”

But I also happen to think a fetus is a person. My two cousins born dead are buried in the family’s plot; if theyd’ been born 100 years before it would have been right outside the house, under the shadow of the eaves, and a climbing plant planted over them: same as a child dead in infancy. A person in actuality or a person in potency, we can be arguing for ages. But a part of the mother’s body, no. If you have your reasons to abort and they weigh more heavily to you than your reasons for not aborting, you do abort, I’m fine with that. But same as I won’t say “you should have had the kid in any case!”, I’m not going to change my notion that a fetus has more value than a mole, or that rejecting your kid because it doesn’t match your idea of perfection isn’t wrong.

Abortion kills. Believing this doesn’t mean I’m anti-choice; I’m actually appalled by how little choice many women have.

42

The old Norse had a similar qualification for when a child becomes a person. Until a child was first fed after birth, it was not considered a person and could be left to die of exposure. This was generally used with babies that had visible deformities, and wasn’t uncommon in a lot of climates where it was cold enough for an infant to die overnight with no protection.

Also, there is documented evidence in the anthropological world that modern Brazilians who live in shantytowns are doing similar things to their children.* Here’s an excerpt from academic article I was able to find online on the topic:

I’ve read the article that Scheper-Hughes wrote about this occurrence while in school, and cannot find the original article. However, it details that these women who were faced with children who were sickly (or sometimes children they just could not afford to take care of) and would make the decision to physically withdraw from caring for the child at all. No food, no water, no attention. Emotionally, these women saw these children as their “angels” and would not be horribly upset over the fact that they died. Sort of a “they were carried off by Jesus” view, but a little different. It’s tough to describe without being able to find the exact article to cite from.

Now, these are extreme examples that are mainly the result of a harsh environment’s pressure to not waste resources, but it does press forth the idea that it’s not uncommon to pick and choose which infants are going to have the best chance of survival. Is it more unethical, however, to do this while this “individual” is a fetus? IMO, certainly not. It’s not necessarily a choice of convenience, but one that uses some acknowledgement of the resources available to a parent. It’s not just a matter of having the time, patience, or energy to handle a child with developmental issues, but also one of whether the community in which the parent lives has resources that the parent can turn to when they feel overwhelmed by their situation. Is it more fair to have the kid anyway, and then give it up for adoption because one cannot handle the responsibility of raising a child with developmental issues? I wouldn’t say so. The American governmental system really does not have the kind of resources to take care of every child conceived that has more developmental issues than the parents may want to deal with, and it’s really unfair that the children that are already in the system are not getting the best treatment that they could be getting. The system is overburdened, and by people selectively aborting fetuses that are shown to have Down’s syndrome in order to avoid the tough decision between raising a child with developmental issues and having it institutionalized is a consequence of living in a wealthy industrialized nation. Is it a tougher decision? Well, that’s subjective, and I don’t think that any of us here can really understand the plight of someone who lives in a shanty with sickly children in a developing nation.

Personally, I’m not against selective abortion, but I do see the ethical issues that come up any time the issue is raised. Yes, there are people who will abort for purely selfish reasons, but is it our responsibility to police someone for not wanting to add further burden to themselves and their society, which has an overburdened social welfare system?
*Small Wars: the cultural politics of childhood by Nany Scheper-Hughes and Carolyn Fishel Sargent, page 9, paragraph 4

43

Another baaaaaaby? Congrats!

44

I actually agree with this from the other side of the issue. If you feel abortion is wrong and should be illegal, than you should stand by that. If you feel it should be legal than why worry if parents are making decisions based on testing and not just a desire not to be pregnant. I actually believe making a decision on testing makes more sense.

I am sure this will be abused by some; I imagine there must be some parents willing to have an abortion who at the same time would abort any “gay” child or any female child* or any child with even a mild defect. However, I think as long as abortion is allowed, the decision should be the parents and not mine or anyone else besides the parents.

I do believe that not bringing a physically or mentally defecting fetus to birth should be allowed. I do not know what my wife would decide to do, but I would encourage her to choose an abortion if we made the mistake of getting pregnant again and it was determined that the fetus had Downs.

Jim

  • China comes to mind
45

You know, before this drops off the front page, I wonder if anyone knows a good solid number of the Down’s Kids being born now as compared to upmity-ump years ago. How far off is AS’s 90% comment?

46

Comments like these misstate the issue. We aren’t talking about handicapped people, we’re talking about pregnancies. If the pregnancy is terminated, then no handicapped (or gay) person ever exists. Sullivan is completely off base in using the word “holocaust.” We aren’t talking about whether another person’s “life is worth living,” we’re talking about whether women have the right to terminate pregnancies before they result in a person who would possess disabilities or other characteristics that the mother is unwilling or unable to deal with. The answer is of course she does.

I admit feeling initially disconcerted by the idea of aborting gay fetuses, but after I thought about it, I couldn’t really find anything wrong with it. So fewer gay people are born. So what? Even if NO gay people are ever born again, so what?

47

Yes, and I will be 38 when she or he will be born, so this is very relevant to me personally. It is not a decision I struggled with. I just think it is wrong for me to abort, especially a pregnancy which I am so happy about.

There is also the practical consideration that tests are sometimes wrong. Some have found that they aborted normal children. I can’t and don’t want to imagine what that would be like.

48

My point was that there is a third option for an opinion, here…you can think that something should be legal, or at least not completely oppose the legality of it (IMO, hard to do in a society such as ours), and still think it is morally wrong. As I said, I don’t debate the legality…to me, it’s a separate issue. But do I think people SHOULD have abortions? No, I don’t. Just because the law has to allow it, doesn’t mean it is right.

I guess my question is, where does the “abuse” line get drawn? What physical defects are unacceptable? A cleft palate? A club foot? What about not getting the sex you want? Is it morally acceptable to abort a child for any reason whatsoever? And I don’t mean, should we as a society stop it, but what should we accept as a perfectly reasonable and OK thing to do?

49

Since no excuse is needed to have an abortion, anyways, and the decision is personal (not societal), what is the point of this debate at all? Sorry to bring a cold term from a different area but this is market driven. Maybe in 30 years, having kids with Down will be fashionable and their numbers will increase. Maybe screening will be perfect and they will disappear. We have no control on the matter. There is no way to protect Down’s Syndrome from disappearing if that is where society is going (and if it is possible at all).

The problem with Downies going radically down in numbers is that it will make the services available to them even rarer and place an added stigma on the condition.

50

Moral is another issue, I do not consider abortions as birth control moral, but that is my morals and I would not impose those on others. I would consider aborting a fetus because it is female and the parents only want a boy to be immoral, but again, I would not impose my morals on them. I do consider aborting serious defective fetuses to be moral, I consider aborting the product of rape moral, and I consider aborting a fetus that would endanger the woman’s life to be moral.

I also consider that anyone who fights to keep teaching normal birth control out of schools to be immoral. I consider any pro-lifer who sets up in busy intersections with very graphic blow-up pictures of abortions to be ill mannered and immoral. They have prevented my ability to prevent my kids from seeing such items. It is wrong of them and it has happened to us.

Jim

51

I think, as far as this thread is concerned, morality is not another issue, it is the issue. I believe what we are having is a philosophical discussion about why some people might feel it’s a moral decsion to abort a baby with Down Syndrome, and why some may feel that it is an immoral decision. The concept of “imposing morals” is an interesting one in this context. The only way to impose a moral is to make something illegal. My having an OPINION that something is immoral is not stopping anyone from doing anything.

OK, well, if I ever encounter people who do those things, I will be sure to let them know that you are offended by them. How that is relevant to this discussion, however, I am not exactly sure.

52

If mothers or parents would want to abort a potential child that had some characteristic undesirable to them, I’m willing to accept that because I’m pro-choice. The real ethical quandry, to me, is when medical professionals should advise on that. Telling parents that their child would have Downs is informing them of a defect. Telling parents that their child could be gay? not so much (IMO).

I find Sullivan’s constructed dilemma rather sloppy, though. I’m pretty sure there are still some bisexuals around, so it looks like genetics isn’t going to be as easy as “either hetero- or homo-”, which is going to throw some twists into his hypothetical gay holocaust – will parents abort if their child might sleep with men and with women? what about if they’ll just briefly sleep with their own gender while in college?

And there are already quite a few oddball correlations that’ve been found for people who identify as gay – studies on fraternal birth order, for example. I doubt there’s been a rush of abortions when people find out they’re having their second or third son, despite evidence of higher likelihood that they’ll be gay (and not just during college). I think I’ll hold off on my moral outrage until there’s some actual facts to be outraged over.

53

We are missing a point here. Right now, in the US and most western countries, people are free to abort any pregnancy for any reason. I am not against this, but it needs to be pointed out.

You can abort a female (or male) fetus for no other reason than you already have a male or female child and wanted one of the other sex. This already happens a great deal in China because of the one-child policy, almost entirely in favour of males.

If it were possible to tell what colour a child’s eyes would be, you could decide you want to eliminate a blue-eyed fetus because the parents and the other kids in the family are brown-eyed (this is genetically very possible) and you want the whole family to have the same colour eyes.

So how can we tell a person they may not terminate their pregnancy if they are carrying a DS fetus or a potential gay or lesbian?

The point is not whether being gay is a disability or a defect. I am gay and I do not consider it so.

On the other hand, people do not have abortions like they have haircuts. I do not believe that every parent, even today, who learns that their child is likely to grow up gay would necessarily opt for abortion. And as homophobia is eliminated from our society, hopefully, aborting a healthy fetus because of sexual orientation will still be a possible choice, but may be as unlikely and frivolous as the above example of eye colour.

Besides, 100% attraction to one’s own sex is relatively rare, just as 100% attraction to the opposite sex. Most people have some mixture of straight and gay, even if it is 90% - 10%. Would people eliminate a fetus who MIGHT be bisexual sometimes in his/her life?

Nobody says that Down’s Syndrome fetuses MUST be eliminated. Nor does anyone say that a poor single parent with 5 kids whose life could be endangered by another pregnancy MUST get an abortion. Even if this sixth pregnancy is going to produce a disabled child. But all the difficulties involved have to enter into the decision.

54

Yes. They could be buied in the walls of houses because the corpse was too young to pollute the house.

55

From the The National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register 2003 Annual Report (.pdf), Page 4, for the UK, not the US:


Table 1: Down syndrome cases diagnosed in 2003* by
time of diagnoses and outcome
						No. 	%
Prenatal	Termination of pregnancy 	 466 	 33
		Live Birth 			  28 	  2
		Still Birth / Miscarriage 	  13 	  1
		Unknown outcome† 		 324 	 23
Postnatal	Live Birth 			 570 	 40
		Still Birth 			  14 	  1
Total 						1415 	100

I have not found similar reporting for the U.S., although I suspect that if the Brits, a less “religious” society with better access to some forms of medical care are only terminating 33% of Down Syndrome pregnancies, 90% might just be a tad high for estimates in the U.S.
(Even if we arbitrarily throw most of the “unknown outcome” pregancy tests into the termination category, we still only get to around 50%.)

56

Table 7 on Page 8 of the same report shows a gradual (if unsteady) rise in terminated pregancies from 1989 through 2003, although the figures for terminations + miscarriages + unknowns still hover around 50% rather than 90%.

57

Unless being gay isn’t destigmatized, and is even re-stigmatized as there are fewer gays born. I could envision a scenario where, after the “gay gene” discovery and years of selective abortions for gay fetuses, a gay child actually born would be even further ridiculed, as his parents didn’t love him enough to “spare” him the torment of his peers and gave birth to a “freak” knowingly and without remorse. Yep, scenario pretty much stolen from Gattaca, but there you are.

But back to the Down’s/club foot/cleft pallate issue. Again, even morally, I think it needs to be left up to the parents. This isn’t entirely hypothetical for me, either, as most of you know. I had a daughter almost two years ago born over 4 months early. We were given the choice of a vaginal birth, which due to the position of the placenta would definitely kill her, or a c-section and taking our chances with a possible death or disability later on. That’s still hanging over our heads, and will until she’s 10 or so, even though knockwood, she seems just fine now. But we chose to give her that chance. Was it a moral decision? No, not really. I feel confident that if she had died, God would have taken her soul/spirit/whatever and done whatever He/She/It will do with it when she does die in hopefully 90 years or so. I mean, she’s going to die SOMETIME, right? It was purely an emotional decision, that I couldn’t face the thought of not giving *myself *a chance to have her a little longer. Not morally, but emotionally.

Again, *especially for the religious, I don’t get the moral objection to abortion for any reason or death at all. If you have trust and faith in God, what’s so bad about being dead and with God? If God is all-powerful, then how can you be “thwarting” His will? Perhaps His will is that you do some soul-searching, but if it’s His will that the baby not die, how could you kill it? I don’t get it.
*a meaningless term for me personally, but I hear it’s pretty important to the Abrahamic religions

58

Do not forget that in some countries the imposing might work out the other direction. It is conceivable that a country may begin forcing tests and abortions on fetuses that have Down syndrome or the ‘gay gene’. I would find this to be repugnant also.

I tend to think that the Right to Lifers are trying to impose their will on others with protests at clinics and offices that provide abortions. When they try to blow up said clinics or make threats to medical people involved or thought to be involved and of course having a huge political agenda to get candidates for President that will stack the Supreme Court with Pro-Life judges. That is the strange thing about pro-choice, they are arguing to give people a choice, not that everyone should have an abortion. From my understanding, most pro-choicers would be overjoyed to see the number of unwanted pregnancies approach zero through better planning and prevention.

Sorry, I started writing about ‘moral’ on got on a rant. You are correct, not relevant.

Jim

59

Except that 90% of fetuses with Down Syndrome aren’t being aborted. So his point is decidedly not good. Overblown? Sure. Good? Hardly.

It appears to me that bringing religion into the argument when it is something that is not predetermined simply muddies the issue at hand.

As it stands, Sullivan is attempting to slap at those who are pro-life but have said that terminating a pregnancy is wrong if the fetus is healthy but gay. Until the tests exist that are capable of determining this, it’s simply an intellectual exercise.

Further, I am pro-life. I also have a daughter with Down Syndrome. When my ex was pregnant, she said that she would never terminate no matter what. Since I lacked a uterus (still do for that matter), I felt that the decision was not mine to make. Had I known, I would have desired abortion. I still have nights where I cannot sleep because I wonder what will happen if I don’t outlive my daughter. Of course, I love my child with every fiber of my being, too, and can’t imagine life without her. Simply by her presence, she makes my world a better place.

That said, I think that a woman has the right to abort no matter her reasons. Down Syndrome? Depression? Eye color? Gender? Homosexuality? Inconvenience? Doesn’t matter in the slightest. On the flip side of that, if a woman chooses to carry to term a pregnancy that will not survive upon delivery, or has DS, or is gay, then I think she has every right to do so.

Excellent point, but one that I imagine would have little bearing on a woman just informed that the fetus she carries has DS. As others have pointed out, even in these dawning days of the twenty-first century, people are told that children born with Down Syndrome have lives that are brutish and short. And damned few people know otherwise. Too, maybe the physician is right. Unfortunately there’s no way to know upon initial diagnosis.

Not just “when” but “how”. I think that potential parents should be fully informed that children and adults with Down Syndrome run the gamut from profoundly retarded and unable to care for themselves to all but undetectable. Not just that the child will never be able to count change.

Might I trouble you for a cite? And are you speaking of Trisomy 21 or Mosaicism? Because I find this assertion to be dubious at best.

As does India. A friend who traveled to India wondered if it was the most pro-prenatal nation in the world because of the ultrasound clinics everywhere.

60

Why produce a damaged child when you can produce a healthy one ? And as pointed out, it’s not a person when you abort it.

Recognized, not invented AFAICT. And how do you know they didn’t murder their children ? Child abuse is hardly unknown; Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy, at least in my ( limited ) experience, is used to explain why someone does so, not to accuse them. If anything it’s more likely to be used as an excuse, I expect; “I couldn’t help myself !”

Why not ? Eliminate them all. It’s not much different than eliminating smallpox.