In class we talked about the case on abortions and prenatal
testing, where the case was introduced with a story of an eleven year old girl
named Sarah who, despite having Down syndrome, lives a fairly normal life. Sarah’s story shows just how precious life
can be. This story is not unlike others,
in fact Sarah’s parents started this campaign of sharing many stories just like
Sarah's to help more people, who worry about the future of having a child with
Down syndrome, have a better understanding of what it is like to have a child
with Down syndrome.
There is one thing about this case that I found to be truly
heart breaking. Recently women have started to receive prenatal testing to
discover if their child is positive for Down syndrome or not. With the predominance
of this test being more readily available to more and more pregnant women, the
greater the fear of having a child with Down syndrome becomes. As this test becomes more popular and the
greater the fear of having a child test positive for this disorder, the rate of
abortions of these fetuses due to the anxiety of the parents. In fact 90 percent of women who tested
positive for having a Down syndrome child, opted for aborting the fetus. This
is a truly upsetting statistic, each and every one of those fetuses had the
potential of living a beautiful and healthy life that would bring so much
happiness into the world.
I think that abortions in general are not right, but the
fact that someone would rather lose their baby, because they are afraid of what
they believe to be a bad thing, than get to experience having such a precious opportunity,
is completely irrational to me. This
abortion of fetus tested positive for Down syndrome is a kind of selective
abortion, where parents decide to abort the fetus on the basis that the child
will be different in some way than they had wanted or planned on them
being. In these kind of selective
abortions, parents seem to be trying to “play God” in the sense that they want
to have control over something that is not theirs to control, such as deciding
the fate of their child. Although it may
seem as if these parents are trying to do what is best for their child, it is
quite the opposite, they are only being selfish by expressing the belief that they
view their own lives to be more important than that of a child, who may be
viewed as being different by the world.
I totally agree with your post. This aborting babies that are testing positive for Down syndrome gives great cause to be shocked and concerned.
ReplyDeleteI believe it was something brought up in class that is extremely worthy of consideration. And that is: if this is permissible (morally), what are the future implications. Looking at this from a Rule Utilitarian, Kantian and Natural Law moral perspective, such an act is morally not permissible.
Aborting babies testing positive for Down syndrome surely does not offer the best possible benefit (Rule-utilitarian) in areas of trust for medical testing, evaluative measures, parental decision making. Kantian argument would say the abortion (Down syndrome testing) is being used as a means to an ends. Also, it violates the Categorical Imperative. The possibility of an action such as this becoming something practiced and permitted across the board in any circumstance would send the country down a spiral that at some point could encompass something as trite as, eye color. Natural Law surely would rule this out as it violates the laws of nature (trying to become ones own God to factor out a perceived deficient within humanity).
This has an overtone of using abortion as a way to genetically engineer what someone has arbitrarily set as “preferred” in their own manner of thinking. I believe this really would have a great societal, economic, cultural, spiritual effect in everywhere practiced. This seems to go hand in hand with the other part of the article about aborting girls. (This is something that China is experiencing now. Because of the one child mandate, couples have chosen to abort girls for boys. Now the nation’s population is showing the effects – militarism - of this male surplus.)