Aborting the Handicapped

Eighty percent of couples who find out during pregnancy that their child has Down Syndrome choose to have an abortion. According to a New York Post column, this is dismaying to, among others, the American Association of People with Disabilities, whose premise is that "disability is a natural part of the human experience."

The AAPD worries that increasingly sophisticated prenatal genetic testing technologies will mean that parents who are told their expected babies are less than perfect "will experience pressures to terminate their pregnancies from medical professionals and insurers." The worry is not groundless.

One mother who participated in a study of 3,000 members of five state associations of parents of Down syndrome children reported that when, in 1999, she was told that the baby she was expecting had Down syndrome, a geneticist showed her "a really pitiful video first of people with Down syndrome who were very low tone and lethargic-looking and then proceeded to tell us that our child would never be able to read, write or count change."

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