Abortion and Disability Rights

       I've been enjoying other MOJ-ers' posts, but so overwhelmed with a new casebook edition and various other colliding deadlines as to be unable to blog.  It's great to have such a wide range of people always carrying the ball forward.  Apropos of Rob's reference to the book on medical eugenics ... I recently attended the annual conference of Democrats for Life, which this year focused on their 95-10 Initiative to reduce abortions through policy measures designed to counter economic and cultural pressures to abort.  There were good, substantive presentations on adoption, crisis pregnancy centers, child-care and other resources on college campuses, and so forth.  Perhaps the most interesting presentation was from an executive of a major disability-rights organization, whose group is "abortion neutral" (and who himself took no general position on abortion), but who suggested that pro-life activists, as a strategic matter, should give more attention to the disability-rights aspect of their cause: i.e. to the pervasive use of abortion, after prenatal testing, on unborn children with serious genetic disabilities.  (See this story among others.)

       Would emphasizing this be to emphasize the cases in which most people, rightly or wrongly, view as among the most morally sympathetic for abortion?  Or, by contrast, is the disability-rights critique a strong logical lever that should make pro-choice liberals more uncomfortable with abortion in general?  Such an argument might go something like this:  Any critique of abortion of disabled unborn children cannot logically be confined to that case.  Scholars and activists who are generally pro-choice but criticize the current prenatal-testing and abortion practices assert that "[p]re-natal testing, and the more recent and less common embryo screening and selection, are justified by mistaken assumptions about the quality of life of people with disabilities, and are demeaning to existing people with disabilities"; parents who "select against a fetus because of predicted disability" far too often erroneously conclude that this child could not be one "'who will enrich us, gladden others, contribute to the world, and make us proud.'"  Adrienne Asch, Disability Equality and Prenatal Testing: Contradictory or Compatible?, 30 Fla. St. U. L. Rev. 315, 318, 316 (2003) (restating the critique).  But the same might be said in many, many other cases in which unborns are aborted because mothers believe that the children's lives and the raising of the children will simply be too difficult or stunted because of circumstances (poverty, many born children already, single parenthood, etc.). If abortion is a troubling judgment of hopelessness about the lives of born disabled people -- troubling even if the parent(s) reaches it after much conscientious consideration -- then it must also be a troubling judgment of hopelessness about the lives of born people in many other circumstances as well.  I wonder what others think about this.

                                      Tom B.