Whatever your personal beliefs on abortion. The fact is that woman have always gotten abortions, and they always will get abortions. Backstreet abortions would likely be more traumatic to the woman and the foetus than most clinical ones. So, providing woman with a safe option is important. Women should have the right to decide about their own bodies, especially in cases such as rape and ectopic pregnancies.
However, there are some aspects of current abortion practices that are utterly indefensible. The ableist and eugenic practices that are happening right now in this country are shocking. The current abortion laws in the UK regarding disabled foetuses are just legalised and socially accepted genocide of a group of people with a supposed protected characteristic.
It’s completely legal to abort a pregnancy at 40 weeks if the foetus is found to have a disability, including something like a cleft lip which is completely fixable with surgery and after surgery will have no lifelong implication other than a tiny scar.
So, it’s legal to abort a baby that is completely capable of surviving on its own and living a normal life because at birth, the baby won’t be perfectly healthy. Say a 1-year-old fell over and cut their lip and needed surgery to repair it, do we say no, let’s just kill them, they will have no quality of life anyway? No, of course not.
Its disgusting, but not surprising. Parents constantly say that they don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl, they would love it either way, as long as its healthy. With the huge glaring implication that they wouldn’t love their baby if it wasn’t healthy. And that isn’t just conjecture, something like 90% of babies diagnosed with down syndrome in the womb are aborted.
I feel sorry for the children of parents that say they would only love their child if its healthy. If they get sick it must be devastating. They are unwell and having to be worried if their parents still love them? It must be so frightening, what happens if they don’t get better?
Its considered horrific sexism when people get abortions because the foetus is a girl, so it follows that it is horrific ableism when people get abortions because the foetus is disabled.
And the argument that disabled babies won’t thrive and would have a poor quality of life doesn’t work because what quality of life are girls born into today? 1 in 2 women are sexually assaulted and 1 in 5 women are raped.
What exactly is so unappealing about letting a disabled baby experience life? Even if it is a short and non-typical life. I have an incurable disability that causes me pain every day and I would choose life with the disability over no life every time. Sometimes I wonder if the suffering of the disabled baby isn’t the problem. The real problem is the accommodations the parents don’t want to make.
Women deserve equal rights, why don’t disabled people? Just to be really clear, I’m not proposing promoting the rights of the disabled at the expense of women and their rights. I’m saying the laws regarding when it is legal to abort a disabled baby should be the same as when it is legal to abort a non-disabled baby.