Your position strikes me as pretty bizarre. If your child has a congenital defect that can be cured or ameliorated by post-natal intervention, should you refuse to use it because you “took a risk” and must therefore “accept the consequences”? Given that you’re not objecting to abortion as such, *why* should you accept the consequences? We constantly take risks and then, if they don’t pan out, try to reduce the negative consequences.

See, this is why technology is neat. It’s true that, in the past, parents were (or felt) stuck with a child with major birth defects, even if they would have preferred no children over a child with these defects. There was no way to detect them before birth, and the child was unlikely to be adopted once the defects became obvious. Technology that enables early (pre-natal) detection of birth defects is important, because everyone acknowledges that children have completely different moral rights after birth. Aborting a fetus with birth defects is different from killing a child with birth defects, in exactly the same way that aborting a fetus for any other reason is different from killing a child for that same reason.

Just to be clear, what I am saying is that if you would abort a defective fetus, then don’t have the child in the first place–abort unconditionally.

My answer would be that when you decide to have a child, you run a risk. You should accept the consequences of taking that risk. If you are not willing to take the risk, then don’t have the child.

If you would have aborted a child with detectable birth defects, what would you do with a child whose defects were only discovered at age 2 months? Kill him then?

When 85% or more of women are taking advantage of technology to choose not to have defective fetuses, how exactly is that not a GOOD thing? I could’ve sworn that’s what technology is like this is FOR…

You know, any given woman in the United States is likely to have 2 or 3 children. Of all the possible millions of combinations of gametes – and thus millions of potential children – she’ll very likely have either 2 or 3 of them. I kind of have to wonder at the collective arrogance of people who would tell her and her family that she somehow “owes” it to the disabled community to be forced to bear one with defective genes.

Who are these jerks who think they know better than she does that the child wouldn’t create an unbearable strain on her family? on her other children? on their finances? And will these moral arbiters be around to personally care for her Downs child if it lives on after her death? You people are too much – I can’t wait for one of you to be in her shoes!

1. While it is currently voluntary on the part of the mother, it might be that in the future that it becomes compulsory or at least strongly encouraged for women carrying children with birth defects to abort them. The path this might track is similar to smoking, perhaps. In my lifetime it has gone from being okay everywhere, to forbidden on planes, to forbidden in parts of restaurants, government buildings, “public” buildings, and now everywhere

2. Also, within recent memory, the practice of forced eugenics was common in the United States. Oliver Wendell Holmes, still the most respected American jurist, once said “Three generations of idiots are enough,” regarding forced sterilization in the case of Some Lady v. Some State or something.

I think people might be making an internal slippery slope argument regarding aborting fetuses that have birth defects. While I agree that a woman choosing to do so for her own reasons is unobjectionable, I do understand the sort of scenario that some might be envisioning.