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Hastings Center Studies in Ethics
Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights
As prenatal tests proliferate, the medical and broader communities perceive that such testing is a logical extension of good prenatal care―it helps parents have healthy babies. But prenatal tests have been criticized by the disability rights community, which contends that advances in science should be directed at improving their lives, not preventing them. Used primarily to decide to abort a fetus that would have been born with mental or physical impairments, prenatal tests arguably reinforce discrimination against and misconceptions about people with disabilities.
In these essays, people on both sides of the issue engage in an honest and occasionally painful debate about prenatal testing and selective abortion. The contributors include both people who live with and people who theorize about disabilities, scholars from the social sciences and humanities, medical geneticists, genetic counselors, physicians, and lawyers. Although the essayists don't arrive at a consensus over the disability community's objections to prenatal testing and its consequences, they do offer recommendations for ameliorating some of the problems associated with the practice.
In these essays, people on both sides of the issue engage in an honest and occasionally painful debate about prenatal testing and selective abortion. The contributors include both people who live with and people who theorize about disabilities, scholars from the social sciences and humanities, medical geneticists, genetic counselors, physicians, and lawyers. Although the essayists don't arrive at a consensus over the disability community's objections to prenatal testing and its consequences, they do offer recommendations for ameliorating some of the problems associated with the practice.
392 pages, Paperback
First published January 28, 2000
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June 24, 2008
Though I was less interested in the first half of the book-- largely a discussion of the "hurtful speech act" possibly constituted by aborting (or testing for the presence of) a fetus with various qualities, thus demeaning the community of living persons with those same qualities-- I was fascinated by the policy discussions in the latter half.
It seems obvious now, but in fact we do have in this country an explicit public-health policy that evaluates and seeks to prevent the incidence of various "disabilities". It is how this policy plays out in a cultural environment of ignorance, misinformation, and intolerance that makes it so complex and challenging. I was left with the familiar feeling that though individual choices matter a great deal in determining how our society welcomes or fails to welcome people with differences of various kinds, it is ultimately the larger institutions we have entrusted with policy-making that will have the controlling vote.
Really interesting stuff. I appreciated the diversity of voices, and look forward to more reading on this subject.
It seems obvious now, but in fact we do have in this country an explicit public-health policy that evaluates and seeks to prevent the incidence of various "disabilities". It is how this policy plays out in a cultural environment of ignorance, misinformation, and intolerance that makes it so complex and challenging. I was left with the familiar feeling that though individual choices matter a great deal in determining how our society welcomes or fails to welcome people with differences of various kinds, it is ultimately the larger institutions we have entrusted with policy-making that will have the controlling vote.
Really interesting stuff. I appreciated the diversity of voices, and look forward to more reading on this subject.
Displaying 1 of 1 review