Week 5: Issues in Bioethics and Human Rights

Adrienne Asch, “Disability, Bioethics, and Human Rights” Readings Package #13
Mark Priestley, Chapter 2 of Disability: A Life Course Approach


Would you terminate a child if you found out from prenatal screening that he/she has Down syndrome or an imperfection? “Is it appropriate to use technology and skill to sustain the life of someone who would have a disability”?

The two articles this week pertain to the same topic: bioethics and eugenics. Both articles revolve around the medical perspective. The medical perspective in the first article by Asch revolves around the issue of bioethics. The field of bioethics looks at health and illness, and what constitutes a life worth living. Asch also looks at how prenatal testing and selective abortion is trying to slowly decrease the number of individuals with disabilities or impairments in our society.

“Bioethics has supported claims that life with disability should not be maintained”. An example of this would be family members making the decision for those with a disability, or mental impairment, who want to end their life or want physician assistance in dying. Another example of this would be prenatal testing and selective abortion. Going back to the question of whether you would terminate a child if you found out he/she had an imperfection, what would be the determining factors? It is not only a personal choice a couple faces, but one that is mainly influenced by the public. Asch states, health care professionals and theorists, believe prenatal testing, and if detection is found, will “promote family well-being and the public health”. Personally, it seems the medical perspective is trying to slowly eliminate the number of people with disabilities in society because of the stigma and stereotypes that go along with being disabled or impaired. An unborn child, with a disability, should be given the same chance at life as those babies who are conceived to unsuitable parents.

Priestley makes the point that there is also a lot of pressure on mothers to have a “normal baby”. Mothers are “supposed” to have normal children and if they do not produce one, it may seem to the woman that she has failed at child bearing and being a good mother.
Due to prenatal testing, it leads us back to the medical perspective where it has a large influence on reproductive choices. In a way, due to eugenics and prenatal testing, it allows for us to “control” who we want in society. If parents decide not to have their child, due to medical reasoning, would our society be “disabled free”, 50 years from now?

I believe we are “disabled” in one way or another. We all have our own little quirks and weird habits, however, how does this make us seem “normal”, when in reality, we are just the same as the person in a wheelchair. Because our society is focused largely on individuality, it has now become the new conformity. With everyone trying to be different, we are all moving toward similarity because we do not know how to be different.

In the chapter by Priestley, impairment is seen as “undesirable” and the main purpose behind prenatal screening and selective abortion is to reduce the number of children born with disabilities. Terminating a child does not only revolve around the fact that a child has a disability. It also includes social, economic and familial issues.

The direct-action protest group Not Dead Yet, argues singling out those with disabilities or impairments, as people who want to end their lives, is a very narrow minded approach to disability. They believe those who are impaired should end their lives because their lives are “understandable of less value to them and to others…”. Again, it goes to show that society believes this is what the disabled person wants, just because they seem to be living in pain or difficulty. However, “every life has burdens, some of them far worse than disability”.

I found the views of those in Asch’s article to be very negative. Everything surrounding those with a disability has to deal with politics and it shows how strongly society has an effect on parents and their decision to whether or not to keep their child.

I believe the public, society, family units, societal norms all play a large influence on parents who face the decision to terminate their child or not. However, it is up to the parents to decide if they are prepared and ready to have their child face a world of stigma, stereotypes and most of all, a society that is too focused on the able bodied and being “normal”.