This article focuses on the sometimes difficult idea that abortion should be allowed where the baby would be disabled.
This article focuses on the sometimes difficult idea that abortion should be allowed where the baby would be disabled.
Some ethicists don't like the argument that abortion should be allowed where the baby, if born, would suffer from physical or mental handicaps.
One argument goes like this:
Another argument goes like this:
A third argument is that allowing abortion of a foetus with a disability permits eugenic abortion - abortion to eliminate disabling genes from the human race.
Section 1(1)d of the UK's 1967 Abortion Act allowed termination of a pregnancy at any time if there was a significant risk of the baby being born seriously disabled. Under other circumstances abortion has to take place during the first 6 months of the pregnancy.
The Disability Rights Commission criticised this section in the following words:
The Section is offensive to many people; it reinforces negative stereotypes of disability and there is substantial support for the view that to permit terminations at any point during a pregnancy on the ground of risk of disability, while time limits apply to other grounds set out in the Abortion Act, is incompatible with valuing disability and non-disability equally.
In common with a wide range of disability and other organisations, the DRC believes the context in which parents choose whether to have a child should be one in which disability and non-disability are valued equally.
Disability Rights Commission
Modern society believes certain things about people with disability:
However, accepting these things does not change the fact that, other things being equal, to have a disability is to be worse off than not to have that disability.
It is possible to accept that and still to think:
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