To believe that Britain promotes eugenics.

[WriterofDreams]

I am aware this is going to be highly controversial and could upset some people but it's an issue that genuinely concerns me and I'm not just shit-stirring. I do expect to get flamed, but any reasonable argument or debate is very welcome.

I come from Ireland where abortion is illegal. I am fully aware that many Irish women go abroad for abortions so I'm not saying look how great we are we don't abort. However, until I moved to the UK I never heard of the practice of people testing their baby for anomalies and then aborting them if there was something wrong. It genuinely shocked me that a couple who tried to have a baby, went through the sometimes stressful process of ttc, got the longed-for bfp and then lived with the expectation of a baby for many weeks could then go and kill that baby because it had Down Syndrome or some other (non-lifethreatening) genetic condition. I have looked it up on a number of sites and extreme though it may appear I can't get past the feeling that this basically hidden eugenics.

What do you think?

Irish Catholic, I should say - being cultural vs religious, really.

Cross post WOD, sorry to hear you have experienced rape. I would have made my point more sensitively if I had read your post: though I still think it's worth thinking about where guilt comes into it.

I wouldn't say guilt so much as responsibility arses (great name by the way!). I don't think sex is anything to feel guilty about however equally I don't think it's just a fun thing to engage in. It carries consequences and today's society seems to want to ignore that.

DuelingFanjo do you see what you are doing there? I am not picking, but do find it interesting that you refer to the 'disabled foetus' and 'child born of rape'

You also say 'it appears you are giving a disabled foetus more right to exist than a child conceived through which, let's face it, is only in existance through no fault of its own. '

Would you say that the 'disabled foetus' is at fault for being disabled, then? I doubt it, yet you consistently refer to the disabled 'foetus' but the 'child' of rape.

I wonder if it is part of our subconscious way of downrating the unborn child with disability, so that it make the termination more palatable and acceptable?

Yes, but in your equation, if you don't make a choice about sex, that changes your responsibility to the foetus.. that's the bit that doesn't make sense. Because that, to me, is a peculiarly Irish Catholic sensibility: original sin etc. If you choose to have sex, then the resulting cells/foetus/baby are your responsibility but if you didn't, it isn't? I'm not sure I really understand that.. it suggests that the type of conception has a bearing on the dignity/equality/personhood of the cells/foetus/baby? Yet a genetic quirk of fate doesn't?

The wrangling with semantics that surrounds abortion often baffles me TBH, surely it doesn't matter what you call it? It still feels the same amount of pain and dies the same way whether it's a foetus or a baby. People don't say "foetus" when talking about their own wanted unborn children so why change that when talking about aborted children?

Lougal oddley xenia did it the other way round

Honestly arses I know I can't really defend my position. I should be entirely pro-life but I'm not. What you say is entirely valid and I don't really have a comeback so I'm not going to make up some lameass argument.

PosieComeHereMyPreciousParker Fri 29-Oct-10 19:19:34
The economics argument wasn't brought up by me, I just think Xenia has a point about value is reduced to how much people can contribute.

but who is to say your "perfect" children are ever going to contribute.
and who decides what contributing is.....or are we just talking money. in which case it is sick

WOD, you are grappling with semantics here too, no? In that it would be okay to abort, to use your term, a child conceived violently but not one with a disability? Even one incompatible with life, am I right?

I have been clear that I have my own fuzzy boundaries about this, but I think it is worth delving further into the boundaries here: why do I think it is okay to terminate a baby with no chance of life yet not a disabled baby with a chance of happiness while you think it is okay to terminate one who was conceived as an act of violence against the mother and another feels okay about terminating on the grounds of any disability right up to birth? Omissions, here, speak to what each of us really thinks of abortion, I think.

X post again

"yet you consistently refer to the disabled 'foetus' but the 'child' of rape."

apologies. I was being deliberately emotive to labour the point (rather clumsily) that if someone calls themselves pro-life then it's strange that they can also not believe a pregnancy from rape is NOT a child. It was rather cack handed I admit.

I personally see a foetus as a foetus and a child as a child. I am pro-choice so I think it is up to the individual what they decide to do RE terminating a pregnancy. However I do kind of expect Pro-lifers to be consistant RE the horror they feel about aborton.

might have put too many 'nots' in there so sorry if that still makes no sense!

WriterofDreams, have you heard of Ferdinand de Saussure? He was a Swiss Linguist, who talked about language being the relationship between 'signifiers' and 'signifieds'.

When you say a word, you have a mental image of what that word means. More complicated than it's literal meaning, but connotations.

So, someone may say they were 'hurt' and we get the image of pain, injury. if they say they were 'attacked' we get the image of not only pain, injury, but also of a perpetrator, a person who did wrong.

Although we use words in fairly indiscriminate ways sometimes, at other times, the words we use indicate how we feel about something, and in trying to be objective, we can 'leak' our true feelings.

I think, personally, that using the word 'foetus', while technically scientifically correct, is pushing away the notion that this is a baby. By doing that, it is easier to accept that one could terminate.

Then, using 'child' makes the baby more concrete, more real.

It's why some people use terms such as 'bundle of cells', because it is easier to think of that at 16 weeks, than a formed baby with skin, eyelashes, fingernails and hair, despite the need for further development to be able to survive outside the womb.

DuelingFanjo x-posts, ah I see

It is difficult. I haven't posted what my opinion on children conceived of rape is. Partly because I fear that any personal opinion I hold would be seen as a judgement on women who do not choose the same path.

I personally, for me, feel that I hope that if I were ever to be in the unfortunate position of being raped, that I would allow any pregnancy that resulted to continue, purely because it is just as much a baby, and it isn't the baby's fault that it was conceived through an act of violence. Of course I could never know now what powerful emotions may take over, let's hope I never do.

FWIW, after I conceived through IVF I referred to my child as a Foetus for quite a long time as after my earlier miscarriage I was very aware that something may still go wrong and during the IVF I was very aware of the different terminology - Embryo, Foetus, baby.. etc.

Yet when I had my termination many years ago I talked to my 'baby' even though I knew what I was choosing to do. Maybe it is inconsistant and I can say for sure that a choice to terminate now would be a million times harder for me than it was back in the early 90s. I am still grateful that I have the choice if I need it though.

2shoescreepingthroughblood Fri 29-Oct-10 19:41:50
PosieComeHereMyPreciousParker Fri 29-Oct-10 19:19:34
The economics argument wasn't brought up by me, I just think Xenia has a point about value is reduced to how much people can contribute.

but who is to say your "perfect" children are ever going to contribute.
and who decides what contributing is.....or are we just talking money. in which case it is sick

My apologies 2shoes if you cannot see that my post are exploratory, trying to explain why people may have different attitudes to pregnancy with different outcomes for the foetus. I agree with Xenia that on some level we are all valued by our ability to financially contribute, I don't agree with this but I understand it. Some people want a perfect life and can't see disability fitting it. I also think people fear people with disabilities and therefore have knee jerk reactions to them. On a personal level I am way too selfish to give up any more than I already have to be a parent.

DuelingFanjo I find that interesting - it kind of backs up my point that perhaps you were referring to your baby as a 'foetus' because it allowed you to distance yourself emotionally in case you miscarried?

I can also understand you talking to your 'baby' because that was the closest you were ever going to get to meeting your baby at that time, and presumably you still found it hard, even if you felt it to be the right decision?

Lougle, I thought the relationship between the signifier and signified was purely arbitrary? At least, I wrote this in almost every undergraduate paper I could manage to make it relevant to .

I found the whole being pregnancy after a double contraceptive failure really hard, particularly as I hadn't been sexually active for very long and I just felt the whole thing was so unfair. I found the decision to terminate very easy - some might say too easy. I have never regreted it and I didn't suffer from it afterwards but the whole process of being pregnant and in that position really was hard for me.

Having a miscarriage many years later was a lot harder, purely because the baby was so wanted. I was messed up by it for quite a while.

With advance apologies for pursuing the linguistic point (another obsession of mine [hblush] ) ... My final miscarriage was a spectacular one, in which the DEAD BABY came out whole and apparently perfect. It was a wonderful little thing. However, to me it was a foetus. Unable to breathe or feed; altogether a fantastic creature with no existence of its own - a foetus. I don't use the word to de-emotionalise it (I was a tad emotional at the time), devalue it or anything else. Foetus is the accurate word for a potential being, which does not yet exist as that being. You know when there's a spot in your egg? I call that a foetus, too. A chicken is the unfledged bird that breathes.

Personally, I think calling a foetus a baby is an emotionally-charged trick: used for great benefit by parents-to-be, while planning their immediate future, and for moral bullying by anti-choicers.

Personal opinion caveat, natch.

existence should have said life. Linguist, me? [hblush]

PosieP, may I just applaud you on this? On a personal level I am way too selfish to give up any more than I already have to be a parent.
There's more polemic than personal honesty on this thread. Well done, you :)

I can't read all this, it'll make me too cross. But I did want to point out to OP that the alternative to allowing prenatal testing and abortions may be what we had prior to that, where midwives suffocated disabled babies or their parents did, quietly, soon after birth.

I don't know enough about disabilities to comment on them, but I do know people. You do what you have to do and people just make the decisions that are right at the time for their families.

It is not eugenics for one person to make a decision. If that decision is coerced by the state - for example, if disability benefits are withdrawn and it becomes financially impossible to care for a disabled child - I would say that is eugenic practice.

This thread has made me think a lot about it all, we often have a POV for so long that we forget why we hold it.

wmmc....that is libertarian too!