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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.
Yes, one must acknowledge the Downs sufferer as, in most cases, very happy. Often happier than people with the correct number of chromosomes. The death cannot be justified on any QALY-adjacent basis for the dying party, even if it possibly can on the surviving one (but not necessarily).
The death should be understood as a social consequence of the fact that It is considered unacceptable to abandon your child to the state unless you are dead, dying, or totally incapable of looking after it. Severe illness or the fact that looking after them would make a comfortable, low stress life very difficult or impossible is not considered an acceptable reason. Families that don’t care about abortion would be scandalized by a mother deciding she just doesn’t want to deal with the stress and giving a baby up.
And I think that’s the counterargument to @HereAndGone’s point. Mothers’ domestic labor, time spent on child-related work and interaction has gone up even after the automation of a lot of time consuming domestic work. Mothers are expected to provide a holistic level of total life management, love, care, education, training and self-actualization to their kids that their grandmothers and great grandmothers never were. You are a bad mother if you mother the way mothers did for thousands of years.
In this new world of ever higher expectations, of total commitment, raising any child means something very different to what it was sixty years ago. It isn’t chill. It takes all of your time. You’re not occasionally checking in on the kids playing by themselves while gossiping with your friends in the afternoon. You’re alone, or maybe working, and then you’re micromanaging their lives. Adding a severely disabled child for whom you will have to do this for the rest of your life rather than for 18 years makes for an even worse proposition.
I see some truth here, but literally all US states have some degree of Baby Moses law for newborns: we literally have adopted "no questions asked 90 day returns" in some jurisdictions, although I can't speak to how often those are actually used in practice (quick searches suggests low hundreds of cases annually).
She said social consequences, not legal.
Agreed - it would be less scandalising for a middle-class woman in most places to have an illegal abortion than to use a Baby Moses law.
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