Not all medical tests save lives. Recently one of the free newspapers spread the news that over 80% of babies in Switzerland diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. (A bit of checking shows that’s correct and perhaps even an underestimate.) They also reported parents of downies who didn’t abort them getting dirty looks or even comments saying, “Why did you bring that one into the world?”
The papers followed that up with write-in reactions of its readers. I don’t think a single one of them was in favor of aborting downies. Now, I’m sure it wasn’t a representative sampling, because 20% of Swiss mothers don’t have Down syndrome kids, but what happens between the writing of the rather harsh condemnation of those who abort downies and the 80% abortion rate? Or is the write-in reaction so self-selective that those who don’t mind aborting a baby that might be handicapped also don’t really care about the topic?
I find the report particularly poignant in light of a recently released movie. It’s about the life of a Spanish Down syndrome patient who graduated university and works as a school teacher.
And finally, it confirms me in our decision to limit prenatal diagnostics as much as possible.
Hateful! Seems very biased to me! 80% of downies aborted … I’ve heard on a kind of frequent basis in America, of mothers killing their autistic children, just because they thought it was “best for them.” Are you kidding me? Just because one gene is off in their DNA, doesn’t mean you need to clear them off the earth, it’s not fair to them. They’re just like anyone else, those downies!
I tried to find statistics for the U.S. without success — just some guesses made on published abortion data, and much of that is bound to be incomplete or wrong.
Even if one believes in abortion for any and all reasons, the dirty looks and “Why did you bring that one into the world?†attitudes should be beyond the pale. (That does, however, reflect the attitude of many toward third children in the latter half of the 20th century; Ender’s Game was not so far off in that respect.) And it presages trouble for handicapped people, as more and more people begin to believe that those who are not “normal” are better off dead.
There are endless possibilities for well-crafted and heart-rending (or terrible and sappy) movies: The father who pressures his wife into aborting a DS child on the grounds that caring for it would disrupt their family life, then becomes paralyzed in an accident and watches his wife make the same calculation. The mother who aborts a handicapped baby and explains to her other children that the child will be “happier in heaven,” then overhears those children saying the same thing to each other as she lies in her nursing home bed. Alfred Hitchcock could do it well.