Babies aborted for minor disabilities
October 21st, 2007By Sarah-Kate Templeton, health editor of the (London) Sunday Times:
MORE than 50 babies with club feet were aborted in just one area of England in a three-year period, according to new statistics. Thirty-seven babies with cleft lips or palates and 26 with extra or webbed fingers or toes were also aborted.
The data have raised concerns about abortions being carried out for minor disabilities that could be cured by surgery.
Abortions are allowed up to birth in Britain in cases of serious handicap, but the law does not define what conditions should be considered grave enough to allow a termination late in the pregnancy.… The stage at which the abortions were carried out was not recorded, but the abnormalities would have been diagnosed at about 20 weeks’ gestation. Welsh data show babies were aborted for cleft lips and palates at 27, 29 and 34 weeks between 1998 and 2005.
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on Sunday, October 21st, 2007 at 4:15 am and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, abortion, cleft palate, prenatal diagnosis.
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October 29th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
What are these parents thinking? That human lives are products that can be returned to the realm of oblivion if slightly dented? Do they not realize the stigma they are enforcing by denying humans who could be physically different the right to exist? They are upholding the social message that Nancy Mairs writes about in WAIST-HIGH IN THE WORLD (112): The one of marginalizing people with disabilities with the emphasis that “no one with the power to choose would ever have permitted them to exist.” This situation is scarier, however, because cleft lips and club feet are not so much “disabilities” but physical abnormalities. If this continues, people with biological differences will be looked upon as mistakes that could have been prevented. This type of abortion hints to a kind of extinction, where the surviving beings with disabilities could be pushed to the edge of society as people who should have been prevented life.