From the [UK] Daily Mail:

British opposition leader David Cameron has risked angering hardline anti-abortion campaigners by saying he will vote to continue to allow abortions at virtually full term when a minor disability is diagnosed in utero. Cameron has a son with a disability.

… Members of Parliament are expected to vote on a proposal to change the rule that allows abortions as late as 39 weeks if the unborn child is diagnosed with a disability. But Mr Cameron said: “I won’t be supporting that. The current law should remain.”

… The issues raised by the legislation are sensitive ones for Mr Cameron because his five-year-old son Ivan was born with a severe form of cerebral palsy and epilepsy and needs 24-hour care.

A full-term pregnancy is approximately 40 weeks.

The story drew many comments, including this one:

Both Cameron and Brown have children with disability and yet both support abortion up to birth for disability. Is this their real position or are they simply trying to curry voters’ favor because they believe that most people in this country see disabled people as an encumbrance?
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Rebecca Atkinson has not had her unborn baby tested for Down syndrome. She knows some people will say that was irresponsible. But how, as a disabled person herself, could she let her child’s physical condition decide whether or not it was born?

From the [UK] Guardian:

In a wide-ranging first-person piece, Rebecca Atkinson examines selective abortion from the standpoint of a person with a disabling genetic condition herself. Atkinson, who describes herself as a “pro-choicer,” has Usher syndrome, which causes partial deafness from birth and gradual loss of sight in adulthood.

Atkinson describes her life as no less worthy of existence than any other, and says the “pain and suffering” of disability that people seek to avoid are “largely inflicted not by the physicality of the disability itself but by the negative attitude of others.” That knowledge led her to decide not to get prenatal screening for Down syndrome for her own pregnancy, and instead to face down accusations that she may “burden society with a disabled child.”

An excerpt:

In my view, a decision to test rests on the premise that a baby with Down syndrome is at worst something that needs to be caught in the net and disposed of, at best something that needs to be emotionally “prepared for” rather than just accepted as a child that falls on a different part of the spectrum of human life from the next. Once I had decided that, even if it were possible, I wouldn’t be willing to test for my own impairment, or terminate a pregnancy on that basis, the decision not to screen my baby for Down’s syndrome came easily. After all, if I feel it’s wrong to value a “normal” life over and above mine, shouldn’t I extend that belief to all impairments, not just the one I know about because I have it myself?

There: I’d made the “individual choice” about my reproductive destiny that the pro-choicer in me believes in … It was an easy decision to arrive at, but a much harder debate to depart from. For it is here, where pro-choice feminism collides with disability rights, that my once black-and-white views suddenly become grey and I’m left struggling with the question of whether abortion is always justifiable, after all.

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Democratic candidate Perdue pledges to seek financial compensation for victims of sterilization

From the Winston Salem Journal:

The two leading Democrats running for governor both say they support steps to help surviving victims of North Carolina’s now-defunct forcible-sterilization program. But Beverly Perdue went a step further than her opponent, Richard Moore.

More than 7,600 people were sterilized between 1929 and 1974 under a eugenics program operated by the state.
Perdue, who is currently the state’s lieutenant governor, released a campaign proposal this week to enact the recommendations of a 2003 task force, which suggested that the state form a special foundation with the goal of providing financial reparations to survivors.

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From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

An exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota examines the eugenics movement implemented by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, and the role that scientists played in legitimizing and implementing policies aimed at changing the genetic makeup of the population. The exhibit points out the parallels with activities in the United States and elsewhere.

Eugenics is the belief that the human species could be improved by discouraging or stopping reproduction by people with genetic defects or undesirable traits and encouraging reproduction among those believed to have desirable, inheritable traits. It was carried out to its most horrifying extremes in Nazi Germany.

The theory also was promoted and practiced in places beyond Germany, including the United States and Minnesota.

… In Minnesota, a 1925 law paved the way for the sterilization of more than 1,200 “feeble-minded” or insane patients at the state hospital in Faribault, according to Neal Holtan, a medical historian and medical director of the St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health Department.

… Experts said the exhibit raises questions about present-day concerns over the intersection of science and politics, the rights of individuals versus the larger population and 21st century eugenics.

“We have the human genome. As soon as we start passing judgment on what are good genes or bad genes, it’s going to start all over again,” said Holtan.

Prof. Albert Harris’ wife Elizabeth Harris reponds to criticism of her husband.

Lara Frame, a student in Prof. Harris’ class who has a brother with Down syndrome, launches ‘Pro-Humanity’ effort.

The National Down Syndrome Society has posted a letter to Prof. Harris. An excerpt:

Personal opinions, such as yours, typically stem from a lack of current and up-to-date information about Down syndrome. This directly impacts negative public perception of people with Down syndrome and ultimately affects the decisions expectant parents are making.

Prof. Harris commented in class last week that older mothers have a moral reponsibility to have an abortion if their fetus is diagnosed with Down syndrome. See earlier posts here and here.

From the Charlottesville [Virginia] Daily Progress:

Former Charlottesville Mayor and longtime Del. Mitchell Van Yahres died Friday of complications from surgery for lung cancer.

Van Yahres, 81, served 24 years in the House of Delegates representing Charlottesville and Albemarle County through 2005 as a Democrat who chaired the Agriculture Committee but was best known as a progressive voice and a joyful political warrior.

… Thanks to his efforts, in 2001 Virginia became the first state to express its profound regret for the practice of involuntary sterilization of thousands of poor people and mental patients. California and other states have followed suit with official apologies.

The forced sterilizations of 8,000 Virginians were carried out over several generations into the 1960s at state hospitals through belief in eugenics, a discarded theory and false science that taught racial purity and was used in the 1920s to reclassify the state’s Native American population as black. Thirty states and Nazi Germany had adopted eugenics laws, some patterned after Virginia’s racial purity laws in effect from 1924 into the 1970s.

From the Sacramento Bee:

In a 5-0 vote, the board of supervisors in Sacramento County, California, removed the name of eugenicist Charles M. Goethe from one of the busiest parks in the area around the state capitol.

Goethe, a founder and major benefactor of California State University, Sacramento, was a public advocate of compulsory sterilization of the “unfit” and “feeble-minded,” and railed in his writings against Jews, Mexicans, African Americans and Japanese Americans.

A significant figure in the American eugenics movement, Goethe also praised German scientists who used sterilizations to “purify” the Aryan race before the outbreak of World War II. (more…)