Washington D.C., Oct 19, 2005 / 22:00 pm
Former Washington Post writer Patricia E. Bauer summed up the rarely-discussed pre-natal testing issue well with the headline of her recent column: ‘The Abortion Debate no one wants to have.’
Bauer is the mother of teenage Margaret--a child born with Down syndrome, and a constant reminder of what she sees as the slanted cultural view of children born with disabilities.
“Whenever I am out with Margaret,” she wrote, “I’m conscious that she represents a group whose ranks are shrinking because of the wide availability of prenatal testing and abortion. I don’t know how many pregnancies are terminated because of prenatal diagnoses of Down syndrome, but some studies estimate 80 to 90 percent.”
She cited an overwhelming medical view, which suggests that parents have an obligation to undergo prenatal testing to determine whether their child might have a physical or mental disability, and therefore need to be terminated. She quoted an unnamed Ivy League ethics director who said that it was immoral to bring a disabled child into the world knowing “the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure.”