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An influencer couple announced that they aborted their pregnancy because the fetus had Down syndrome. This upset a lot of people including some fine congressmen.
However, it's actually very common. Screening for genetic disorders is generally performed between 10 and 20 weeks, giving plenty of time for a reasonably early choice. "As a result of these elective terminations in the U.S., there was a 37% reduction in the numbers of babies with Down syndrome born in 2018. This means that in recent years there were 37% fewer babies with Down syndrome than could have been born". In Iceland, almost all such diagnosed pregnancies are aborted after testing.
People with Down syndrome are clearly generally capable of living "happy" lives. They have the equivalent intelligence of an 8 to 9 year old. Most 8 to 9 year olds seem happy enough to me, and it would not be a horrible curse to live decades in such a condition. Perhaps we might ask if such a life is fulfilling, but a young child can't comprehend what that means; as well ask your dog if he's fulfilled by sniffing butts and digging holes.
For the caretakers of course, life may not be so rosy. Taking care of a small child indefinitely, knowing all of the joys and sorrows of adulthood that they will never experience, does not sound fulfilling, to say nothing of the physical and monetary toll. It's therefore unsurprising that most parents choose not to condemn themselves to such a future.
God in His infinite wisdom creates babies with far worse afflictions. Most people would agree that it is ethical, perhaps mandatory, to abort nonviable children who will live only hours in agonizing pain after birth. Down syndrome, as a patently survivable condition, lies on the edge of this boundary.
Personal subject for me, my next oldest brother has Downs. He's a great guy, extremely high functioning, but he is limited in his life options, and he knows it. He wants the same things most guys want, a family, which he can't have. He's been an immense amount of work for my parents, who have been very supportive of him and his relative independence. He was a fair bit of work for me when we were children, as well as being a source of conflict between me and kids looking to pick on the tard. Not a bit of which do I begrudge him, he's absolutely worth it.
But in the larger sense, this option is not a reasonable one for many parents and I don't fault anyone who doesn't have that drive and faith for that sort of thing. I don't have any fundamental moral compunction with soft eugenics at the individual level. Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer. I'll bite the bullet, the correct number of dead (proto)infants isn't zero. Death is not the worst of outcomes. Obviously there will be disagreement over what counts as worse.
I love my brother, and my life is better, and I am a better person for having him. But I'm not going to moralfag about the real costs of that and people who don't want that for themselves or their retard-to-be kid. Those are the sort of life and death choices we have to make about family. When is it time to pull the plug on Grandma? How big a retard do we think we can raise? Nothing the law or the priests or the redditors say is going to remove the responsibility for these choices.
Ultimately, the abortion issue is, like most hot-button political things, just a way to moralfag over who is killing kids, raping kids, shooting kids etc. etc. Meanwhile, basically everyone is on the same page in practical terms. 80%+ of the electorate, including supermajorities of both parties are fine with restricting late-term or partial-birth abortion, but want it legal up to some point and for emergencies, etc. In practical terms, this is the reality in most states. There is no political conflict underneath that except the most extreme five percent on each side trying to either make all abortion illegal or legal after actual live birth.
Yes, there is legitimacy in thinking about the issues as a moral exercise in where exactly we draw the lines for questions like this, of life and death. But the politics of it is just pure bullshit. The underlying problem is not one with a simple answer, but our current system is far from outrageous.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
People think they can enforce their bright-line morality, but it won't work. You can denounce the "blood guilt" of others, but we all kill to live. We all kill those we love, and some of us kill quite a bit more than that. It works at the other end for assisted suicide too. Taken to the logical conclusion, we must all bankrupt ourselves every generation to eke even a single moment of continued brain activity because every nanosecond of life is so precious as to dwarf the world economy. Compromises with reality will be made, and if your morality can't handle reality, then it's not much use to anyone.
The slopes both ways are always slick.
I see no circumstances under which compromising the principle "Don't murder innocents" must be compromised in order to live. Unless you're trying to make some weird point about how supporting some policy or other will cause X deaths or destroy Y QALYs or something like that, I really have no idea what you're trying to say here.
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