I have neither statistics nor anecdata to back me up, but I have to believe that occasionally expectant parents use information gained from genetic screening to better prepare themselves for caring for a child when it arrives.

Very astute.

I suppose that it’s the prenatal testing for these kinds of disabilities that’s the problem. I’m pretty sure it serves no other purpose and the fact that it’s encouraged and pretty well routine is deeply disturbing. I don’t know. What freaks me out is that the one circumstance for abortion (she wanted a baby, but finds out it’s not the right one in there) that I think is really horrible is one of those deemed most acceptable. What a world.

In any case, I’ve no desire to be uterus-cop in any form, and the class-issues regarding abortion you’ve mentioned are huge. Remember how it was illegal and rich women went to Europe and poor women got the frickin’ coathanger?

The potential parents who would have aborted a Down’s Syndrome child with insurance will probably go ahead and do it without insurance, since the lifetime cost of caring for a disabled child is so much higher than the cost of the procedure. The potential exception will be those people who cannot scrape together the funds, which leaves the poorest as those who are required to bear the financial and time burden of disabled children. This isn’t to say that poor parents won’t or can’t give their disabled children excellent care. But it’s a burden I think that they ought to be able to choose instead of one that is thrust upon them by a collection of sanctimonious lawmakers.

As far as the bigger question–about aborting fetuses with chronic but not life-threatening disabilities–I don’t know how to address that or where to start. I truly don’t. But I do know that I have no business telling any woman that she must have a disabled child, when I also have no business telling any woman that she must bear a non-disabled child, like it or not. Stupak will essentially take that choice away from a lot of lower-income families, or at least stick them with the kind of financial distress that medical insurance is designed to alleviate. That’s not the way to reduce ableism–it’s the way to make heritable disabilities a marginalized problem of the lower classes.

Weeelll. Actually, I understand that many plans which cover maternity at all do cover abortions that they deem ‘medically necessary.’ And that includes the situation you described, with the genetic screening of the foetus. There is, I understand, enormous pressure placed on women to do prenatal testing, and abort imperfect foetuses, with the result that some ninety-plus percent of prenatal tests that reveal a likelyhood of Down’s Syndrome result in an abortion. Evidently it takes a lot of grit to carry a Down’s baby to term what with all the people urging you to eighty-six it. I hear that a number of forms of dwarfism can also be revealed prenatally, and are often met with the same response. I really have an issue with this, since, hey, current genetic research about autism (and I’m supposed to feel so supported when people say they donate towards it) is about developing a prenatal test so the existance of people like me can be prevented.

This is only marginally relevant, though — I think eugenic abortion is bad. But I think it should be stopped by stopping ablism and the devaluation of me and people with Down’s syndrom and dwarfism etc, not by telling women what to do with their uteruses.

My first comment was meant as a narrow response to H, not to the entire chorus of opposition to Stupak. I was trying to defend the friendability of people who take Speaker Pelosi’s position that HCR+Stupak beats the status quo. I certainly did not mean to indicate that to think otherwise was wrong.

Starling, that’s a very good point about the cost of medically necessitated abortions. I haven’t seen that publicized at all and it should be.