as small as a world and as large as alone, What do you think about the assertion that...

2:19am July 26, 2014

Anonymous asked: What do you think about the assertion that abortion based on disability is a type of eugenics/genocide? Because I've heard some people with Down's syndrome say that, and I don't really want to argue with them. Like if they say it's super ableist, I'm not comfortable (as an able person) telling them that it's not.

mquester:

pro-choice-and-pro-voice:

I’ve seen a lot of positions on it to be honest, and my answer is how I will always feel about anything concerning abortion, which is it’s your choice, an I don’t think it’s eugenics.

I do feel as though as a society we need to change the attitudes towards disability, and how we help those who have a disability and their families. Because the easier we make it for everyone to function in society, the easier it is for someone to provide a healthy life for their child who might have a disability, if that makes sense, and that’ll make it easier for someone to be able to choose to continue on with their pregnancy and to help keep less disabled children out of foster care.

But I do feel as though it is your choice, and I won’t shame you for that. Because lets be honest, some disabilities or illnesses are emotionally and financially hard and if you know you can’t handle that, you should be able to make the best choice for yourself. If you honestly do not believe that you can provide a good home for them or are uncomfortable with the adoption system pertaining to disabled kids and children of color (sometimes a combo of both) then you have the right to make that choice, because forcing people to produce children when they’re not ready often times harbors abusive environments. Those are my thoughts so you guys can add in if you want -cylina

As an autistic mom of an autistic child, this is a very sensitive issue in the ASD community. When Autism Speaks promotes “curing” autism, the fact is the majority of their research is for prenatal testing. I think that fact shows how devalued autistics are in our society and how negatively autism is viewed by the majority of Americans.

And sadly, Autism Speaks feeds on that negativity and outright encourages it and makes tons of money doing so.

The fact is, if a prenatal test is developed MANY autistic people will never be born, just as the majority of those with down syndrome are aborted now.

But I think it is too simplistic to blame access to abortion if that does happen. People will abort autistics after positive prenatal testing for many reasons, such as stereotypes in society, ignorance about what exactly autism is and even financial circumstances that lead them to feel they cannot care for a special needs child.

And I don’t believe I have the right to make that choice for any pregnant person, even if I personally believe they are making that choice for the wrong reasons - or that their choice will harm people like myself and my son and our place in society.

Raising a special needs child is difficult for most parents, and better they should recognize they are not equipped to do so while pregnant than years later when they abuse or even murder their autistic child. Which sadly happens far too often.

And parents who have to capacity and finances to have an autistic child but abort because they desire a “perfect child” aren’t likely to deal well with with an autistic child anyway, let’s be honest. There are far too many stories of abusive and insensitive parents in adult autistic communities already.

I think prenatal testing and society’s views of autism can lead to eugenics - but there is no way to prevent it without specifically outlawing abortion in the case of fetal disease or disability, and that doing so would severely impact the bodily autonomy and rights of pregnant people. Just like trying to prevent gender preferential abortions, trying to prevent these specific types of abortions would be a near impossibility without making all abortion illegal - and wouldn’t correct the base cause of societal discrimination that is the underlying reason for those abortions.

Any other autistics have a different, or similar view?

Different view on (at least) one point. But first, since I get crap for the language my brain sometimes comes up with in discussions of abortion, Disambiguation Post: On Language Dickery. I will not respond to anyone who decides that the words I use are attached to entire philosophies about abortion or anything else. And no matter what language I use, I am not a fucking closet pro-lifer and won’t put up with such accusations.

So anyway.

There are tons and tons and tons of ways of preventing things without outlawing them. I have had this conversation with other people where they insist that I want to outlaw selective abortion. I don’t approve of selective abortion (for sex, or disability) but that doesn’t mean I want to outlaw it. And there are tons of ways of discouraging selective abortion without outlawing it. But I’ve literally had conversations where I could not get anywhere in the conversation – not just about selective abortion – because a person could not comprehend that it was possible to dislike something without wanting to ban it, and/or to prevent something without banning it.

One huge start would be eliminating the biased information that healthcare professionals provide to parents about what life with a disabled child is like, what life being disabled is like, and what “quality of life” disabled people have. (Hint on that last one: There is plenty of scientific evidence saying our quality of life is identical or close to nondisabled people, regardless of severity of disability. Doctors who do prenatal testing and counseling routinely ignore this science in favor of their biases. The science also says that doctors routinely underestimate the quality of life of disabled people.)

One thing suggested by people with Down syndrome themselves is that when someone’s pregnancy tests positive for Down syndrome, they should have to meet and talk to people with Down syndrome about what it’s like to have Down syndrome, as part of the same ‘genetic counseling’ that right now mostly consists of urging people to abort.

Another big thing is that the doctor shouldn’t be urging people to abort either overtly or covertly, on the basis of disability alone. That decision should be left up entirely to the parents, who should be provided with balanced information about disability, and who should be shown the positive side of life with a disability.

There are easily dozens of things that can be done without outlawing selective abortion. Why do people persist in insisting that objecting to it is the same thing as wanting it outlawed, or that the only possible way to change it is to outlaw it? Why is it that most feminists I’ve encountered will so readily understand why sex-selective abortion is bad, but accuse you of being pro-life if you object to disability-selective abortion?

Oh yeah another thing that would seriously help stop disability-selective abortion is if pro-choicers stopped using the threat of having a child with a disability as a major talking point in favor of abortion. There are many people who are only pro-choice because of the fear that their child might be disabled. Which is horrible. There are plenty of arguments for pro-choice views that don’t depend on that.

(My personal argument in favor of allowing abortion is that it’s my body and pregnancy is a big deal so I get to decide whether someone gets to live inside my body or not. Period. I don’t rely on dehumanizing disabled people, and I don’t rely on angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin arguments about “when life begins” or “whether a fetus is a person” — which are all about whether to apply an abstract idea to a concrete thing. I’m not interested in abstract ideas and how they fit into this whole mess, I’m interested in controlling my body and what happens in it and what and who gets to grow inside it. And that really should be what people are focused on, if they believe in abortion rights. Because most of the other arguments are red herrings that draw us into debates that will never be answered to the satisfaction of either side.)

Anyway, preventing eugenic abortion is not about outlawing it, it’s about making a society where it’s less likely to happen. Same as sex-selective abortion. There are dozens to hundreds of ways to do this, all tied together. I’ve only touched on a few. People actually do think about this and come up with strategies and stuff. In fact a lot of people have done a lot of thinking about this.