Former abortion clinic worker Rayna Rapp, who herself had aborted a disabled baby, wrote a book where she interviewed men and women going through the process of amniocentesis to detect abnormalities in their babies. She has many quotes from these men and women, some of whom aborted, some of whom did not, in her book, but I would like to present two quotes from the author herself. In these, she talks about the conflicting values between supporting the disabled and aborting them before they are born.
“Over the years of this study, I learned a great deal about two related and tension fraught issues. The first is the need to champion the reproductive rights of women to carry or refuse to carry to term a pregnancy that would result in a baby with a serious disability. The second is the need to support adequate, non-stigmatizing, integrative services for all the children, including disabled children, that women bear. The intersection of disability rights and reproductive rights as paradoxically linked feminist issues has emerged as central to my political and intellectual work.”
In the second quote, she discusses how the technology that is aimed that destroying disabled unborn babies cannot be “neutral”,:
“It is hard to argue for the neutrality of a technology explicitly developed to identify and hence eliminate fetuses with problem-causing chromosomes (and, increasingly, genes): the biomedical and public health interests behind the development and routinization of the technology itself evaluate such fetuses as expendable. Ethicists and counselors are surely right to respond that parents of such potentially atypical fetuses have a right to know as well as not to know about the chromosomal status of their fetus, and to use the information however they may wish, whether that means preparing for the birth of a child with special needs or ending the pregnancy. But the very existence and routinization of the technology implies anything but neutrality. It assumes that scientific and medical resources should be placed in the service of prenatal diagnosis and potential elimination of fetuses bearing chromosome problems.”
Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999) 8, 59
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