I see the Church of the Undying Fetus is gaining ground.
9 Likes
7 Likes
The same country where the pope cardinal kicked out of the church the mother who assisted her 8 year old daughter to get an abortion after she was raped by her stepfather?
12 Likes
And by liking your post, I really mean âfor fuckâs sakeâ.
I truly feel sorry for any girls snd women living in Ohio and needing sn abortion. Laws like this make an already distressing and difficult decision so much worse.
14 Likes
This is the thing that bothers me, though â ITâS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE DISTRESSING AND DIFFICULT.
Well yes, it can be. If you wanted a child and then abort because the pregnancy isnât viable, of course thatâs going to hurt a lot.
And while itâs not as major a procedure as the fet-o-philes make it out to be, you donât want to use it as general birth control.
But a lot of the stress and angst around abortion comes from fet-o-philes guilt tripping you. Last night I came across a tweet by someone claiming to have Downs syndrome, cheering an anti-abortion law because it meant âno-one would get to kill people like herâ. Um, babies with Downs are still being born in places where elective abortion is legal. Itâs just exaggeration and melodrama to say otherwise.
Itâs laws and fet-o-phole attitudes that compound the distress and trauma, not the procedure itself.
13 Likes
If my mother had NOT had an abortion when she did, she would never have gone to my fatherâs country and met him. My siblings and I would NOT have been born at all. Counterfactuals go both ways.
15 Likes
Or another baby with Downs except this time they decide to keep it. Bottom line is that all this hand-wringing over the reason for the abortion is second-guessing the person wanting the abortion, and assuming they need instruction on the reason when the only reason they need is not wanting to be pregnant.
12 Likes
Itâs always interesting that the concern for the developmentally disabled gets trotted out for preventing abortion. But these same people push for bills that allow doctors to lie to patients about ultrasound results, thus preventing parents of fetuses that may become disabled children to make arrangements for appropriate care of the child, if born. Almost like the goal is to keep people poor and desperate, and women shackled to the home.
18 Likes
(As in, youâre completely correct.)
13 Likes
And they cut any supports, want to block-cut Medicaid, plan to add work requirements to cut disabled people out of Medicaid, etc.
8 Likes
I recognise that disability-related arguments are commonly coopted by forced-birther bastards to push their vile agenda. HoweverâŚ
Abortion rates for pre-natally diagnosed Downâs amongst parents unfamiliar with disability issues are not far from 100%.
From the perspective of the disability rights community, a person with Downâs is healthy. Disability is not disease.
This is a good paper by Tom Shakespeare:
In this article, I argue that it is unhelpful to characterise the current practice of prenatal testing as straightforwardly eugenic. However, I demonstrate that the medical profession, and the context in which reproductive decisions are made, undermines the capacity for free choice, and promotes eugenic outcomes. I propose a position which accepts womenâs right to choose, but opposes social and cultural pressures for selective termination of disabled people. Finally, I suggest measures which will make it easier for prospective parents to make an informed choice about their reproductive decisions.
4 Likes
With both an aunt and an uncle with Downs, Iâm not sure what âunfamiliar with disability issuesâ means. Still sounds like second-guessing. âAbortion rights are sacred, but if the fetus was going to turn into a disabled baby youâre a eugenicistâ is a helluva thing to say.
And if the decision is to have the abortion even with an âinformed choiceâ? Are they still eugenicists then?
Again, if we respected peopleâs reproductive choices in the first place, this wouldnât even be a debate.
12 Likes
Making it hard for parents to raise neurodivergent children, and making it so they canât be confident of a future once theyâre adults because everythingâs set up to hurt people⌠takes away reproductive choices.
4 Likes
Maybe this is quite different in the UK, where the author is from, but:
If the notion of choice and informed consent in ante-natal screening is to be a
reality , parents have to be trusted to make their own decisions about their pregnan-
cies, rather than rushed onto a conveyor belt where they are forced to make choices
which they have not been prepared for, on the basis of tests which they have not
requested âŚ
this is not at all my experience with prenatal testing. Iâve been offered prenatal testing, for about $1k extra money, out of pocket. I ultimately opted not to take the tests, since I donât have underlying predispositions to anything being tested for. I think there are a lot of places where informed consent is not as good as it could be, but this seems very out-of-step.
And it would be illegal for me, in my state, to seek abortion because of something the tests showed. They have to be honest with me about the results of those tests (unlike TX, where I had my first), but I canât use the results to make decisions about continuing the pregnancy.
That sets up a weird hierarchy: a disabled fetus has more rights than I (a living, breathing woman) do, and an able-bodied fetus has fewer than both. When really, the woman needs to have all the rights.
12 Likes
Prospective parents who have personal experience of people with disabilities, or who have been exposed to educational materials about disability, are significantly less likely to abort a fetus with a disability.
That is not anywhere close to what Tom Shakespeare is saying.
For a quick summary of some of the issues:
-
There is a tendency within the medical profession to assume that all disabled pregnancies should be terminated. Often, this outcome is presented to parents as an inevitability rather than a choice: âIâm sorry, the test shows abnormalities. We can arrange for the termination procedure right now.â
-
Regardless of intentions, the current situation does produce eugenic outcomes.
-
The disability rights community, as represented by folks like Tom, are not advocating any restriction of the right to choose. They are advocating for creating structures that encourage (not compel, encourage) an informed choice.
-
Most of what they advocate is about changing the attitudes and procedures of medical personnel, so that they no longer assume that disabled lives are worthless. They would like doctors to (I) not assume that all disabled pregnancies should be terminated, (II) inform their patients about the existence of educational resources, and (III) make use of the professionals who specialise in this area (e.g. genetic counsellors). Non-directive counselling is a big thing in this field.
Hereâs a relevant bit of the Shakespeare paper:
3 Likes
Okay. How does that contradict the reason doesnât matter, itâs the pregnant personâs right to choose? In that case, the doctors are making assumptions about choices. Thatâs on the doctors, not the parents. As @infundibulum points out, this is leading to situations â not hypothetical, but in existence right now â where a disabled fetus has more rights than both an abled fetus and than the person carrying it. And as @CleverEmi pointed out, forcing someone to have or not have a specific child has impacts on the rest of their reproductive choices.
Bottom line: stop judging people for the reasons around the abortion they freely chose to have, and stop telling people whether or not to continue with their pregnancies.
10 Likes
It does not. The right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy, for any reason, is absolute.
Yes, it is. Which is why medical professionals are the focus of disability-rights advocacy and scholarship rather than individual parents. The issue is structural, not personal.
I donât believe that either Tom Shakespeare or myself did that.
1 Like
You havenât noticed youâre whatabouting?
FFS:
http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/state/idaho/article206437109.html
However, providers now will be mandated by law to report a womanâs age, race, how many children she has, if any of their children have died and how many abortions they have had in the past.
How the unholy fuck is this legal when HIPA privacy laws make my father answer the same two dozen questions every time heâs admitted to the hospital-- even when he was released from that same hospital less than 48 hours previous???
If itâs not going on in their own uterus, then they donât deserve a say. Period.
And that goes double for all the hateful, heartless wretches whoâd happily force a woman to give birth against her will, yet refuse to so much as lift a metaphorical finger to help her house, feed, clothe or care for the resulting child.
12 Likes
I donât really know what you want here. You say that Tom Shakespeare wrote a good paper ⌠but itâs 20 years old, and from another country. People in the US donât have access to prenatal testing for free. People in the US (like 15 million women in TX) may not have the right to access their results truthfully. People in the US may not be allowed to use prenatal testing information when deciding to continue a pregnancy.
You have to pardon me if I donât actually think this is a good paper in the context of this discussion. Does it matter, to me, right now in the US that doctors in England apparently forced women to have abortions? You say:
But I am in that situation, right now. If, at any of my scans, there was evidence of Downâs, I couldnât choose abortion for that reason.
Doctors do this. My doctor was very clear about what would she would recommend and what specialists the hospital contracts with if any of my tests turned up something abnormal.
From my perspective, the US has swung far away from informed consent - crisis pregnancy centers that lie to women, medical practitioners being allowed to lie to women, women being disallowed from considering certain types of testing output in their reproductive decisions, testing not being covered by all insurances - that itâs really hard to see this article as anything other than another attack on choice. The cultural context in which it was written is not at all the same as the cultural context youâre trying to apply it in.
11 Likes