Eugenics in Tennessee

A TN judge wants to sterilize prisoners. I wrote for @MarshallProj on the US history of eugenics and incarceration. https://t.co/7jL24hSvPk

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) July 27, 2017

In my latest piece, I write for The Marshall Project about the history of incarceration and sterilization, of course just scratching the surface in the short commentary.

Under no circumstances should the courts use their power to shape the reproductive decisions of individuals. But sadly, for over a century, attitudes about individuals convicted of crimes have made incarcerated men and women targets of such efforts.

Whether Benningfield knows it or not, his policy follows a long history of eugenic practices in this country. Eugenics is a pseudo-science which holds that the quality of humanity can be improved over generations through practices that encourage individuals with “desirable traits” to reproduce and discourage the “unfit” from doing so. There's a sense that eugenics is confined to a long-ago history, but coercive eugenic practices crop up constantly in the American criminal legal system.

PLEASE READ AND SHARE!

Philosophy, Disability, and The Stone (New York Times)

I have a few requests

ONE: I would like The Stone, the New York Times philosophy column, to sometimes publish philosophers who are disabled and write about the intersections of philosophy and disability rights from that perspective. 

At current time, they have published two essays on disability and philosophy, one advocating that perhaps developmentally disabled people who cannot consent can also not be raped, so long as they enjoy it. 

The other, more recently, came from a grieving father arguing that he should have been able to have his infant disabled son put to death more quickly, with less suffering. More on this latter one below.

Given these two pieces, it's reasonable to suggest that a broader spectrum of philosophy and disability studies might be given some time in this highly public venue. 

TWO: I would like philosophers who want to write about disability to know more about disability. 

This will be long and not entirely organized. It's why it's on my blog and not submitted somewhere formal.

PART ONE: Comstock

Gary Comstock, a philosophy professor at North Carolina State, wrote a searingly painful second-person essay about the need to be able to euthanize suffering babies. It takes you, the reader, step by step through the process of discovering that your baby has trisomy-18 and coming to the decision to disconnect him from the ventilator. Here's a key paragraph.

Some parents choose to use all possible means of continuing their child’s life in the hope that their child will beat the odds and eventually overcome problems. Others choose to let the children die to spare the babies the pain of the ordeal.

Forget the statistics and what others do or don’t do. We would like to know what our Sam’s chances are for reaching the point where his life is valuable to him. But there is no answer to that question. No one can tell you whether your son’s life is worth living from his perspective, or yours. We cannot say whether your son will ever breathe on his own or look at you. We can say only that the literature suggests the odds are stacked heavily against him.

At the end, Sam - the baby -  suffers in his final 20 minutes in this narrative, and the author years later realizes that instead of letting the baby die, it would have been kinder to kill him quickly. He writes:

This thought occurs to you years later, thinking about the gruesome struggle of his last 20 minutes. You are not sure whether it makes sense to talk about his life, because he never seemed to have the things that make a life: thoughts, wants, desires, interests, memories, a future. But supposing that he had thoughts, his strongest thought during those last minutes certainly appeared to be: “This hurts. Can’t someone help it stop?” He didn’t know your name, but if he had, he would have said: “Daddy? Please. Now.”

It seems the medical community has few options to offer parents of newborns likely to die. We can leave our babies on respirators and hope for the best. Or remove the hose and watch the child die a tortured death. Shouldn’t we have another choice? Shouldn’t we be allowed the swift humane option afforded the owners of dogs, a lethal dose of a painkiller?

I find these quoted paragraphs very troubling. The decision that the parents made, faced by suffering and a potentially lethal condition, is not simple. We - the disability community - should not pretend that their decision to let their child die is simple or that we know what we would have done in their place. I, anyway, do know not what I would have done.

But that pathos doesn't mean ignoring the implications of this essay. I am struck by the ease with which agency is given to Sam and then removed within this piece. In the first quote, probabilities govern the decision. In the second quote, the author - again, a grieving father for whom I feel enormous empathy - provides Sam with enough agency to ask to die.

The piece was written in second person, following the rhetoric of the "thought exercise." That's how I reacted to it at first on twitter as I watched disabled friends reel in shock, pain, and horror at seeing their lives compared to that of animals needing to be put down. I've since been "checked" by an ethicist who told me that it's Comstock's real story. I am, it must be said, filled with pain at my mistake. I think back to my son's first minutes and hours after he was diagnosed, just a few minutes after delivery, and imagine that the words were Trisomy 18, not Trisomy 21. I understand why he needs to use his training as a theologian and philosopher to work through the difficult choice he and his wife made. I'm not even going to say that it was the wrong choice. We need, however, to consider for whom else we might want to have empathy.

I feel for Comstock. The question of how to ease death is important and needs good discussion and surely better policy. In America, we tend to die very badly.

I also feel empathy for the child. I feel empathy for disabled people who read this piece. Here's a storify from Alice Wong, featuring Ari Ne'eman's careful disassembly of the piece and its core assumptions. In the efforts to "check me," I haven't seen a response to this. Where is the empathy for the disabled reader who encounters this essay as "Comstock wants to make it easier for me to be killed?" 

What happens in this piece is that the author uses a single story - written as thought exercise, but actually true - in order to abstract generalized principles about making euthanasia more available in cases of trisomy-18 and other potentially lethal or severely disabling natal conditions. It is not, to my reading, based on research into palliative care techniques for suffering infants, but rather the philosophical method of thinking through the ethical and moral implications of the incident. It is rational, except for when it's emotional.

I see this willingness to dismiss the agency, indeed, the humanity, of disabled people as a too frequent consequence of certain strains of ethical and philosophical discourse. We can ... we must ... critique this tendency even as we feel empathy for the author struggling with his past.

PART TWO: Singer

The Comstock essay was published at "The Stone," the philosophy opinion column at the New York Times. It is, to my knowledge, only the second disability piece ever published in "The Stone," the philosophy section of the New York Times op-ed page. The other was, shockingly, by Peter Singer and a co-author, on the case of Anna Stubblefield. As I discussed last April, that essay suggested that if in fact the a person can't consent due to disability, they can't really be raped so long as they enjoy it (no, really, go read the essay). Again, agency is granted only in ways that serve the broader argument about the lack of agency for disabled people.

Shelley Lynn Tremain has written at Disability and Discrimination about her experience pitching "The Stone." She was told that the editor did not want to publish on disability and philosophy, "In part due to my belief that there is not an appropriate platform for writers with disabilities, and writing about disability, I am planning a separate series devoted to it." That separate series has been amazing and important, yet here we still have a "philosophy" site from which disability is excluded ... except when it isn't.

I've received pushback for tweeting that the Comstock essay is indicative of a problem with how philosophy, as a discipline, discusses disability. If I'm wrong, it's due to the intense veneration that Peter Singer still receives. Too many people are willing to regard eugenics and the core humanity of disabled people as a subject for abstract debate, often one isolated from the realities and complexities of real life.

For example, in a link provided me by Tremain (who comments in the post), is Justin Weinberg, an associate professor of philosophy at South Carolina, writing about what an excellent public philosopher Peter Singer is:

“Philosophy always causes offense—perhaps it should cause offense,” says philosopher Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, in a recent interview, below.
Singer is one of the world’s most well-known living philosophers. Some philosophers are clearly bothered by Singer’s renown, in part because he holds philosophical views that many philosophers disagree with. But, of course, that is something he has in common with every other philosopher.
I think that Singer makes for an excellent famous public philosopher.

But it's not just about the "right to offend." Singer has long based his arguments about disability based on ignorance about disability. He assumes a lack of happiness in situations linked to disability, whether imagining it for himself or his child. Yet every time he encounters real people (see this amazing essay by Harriet McBryde Johnson), he admits maybe disabled people are happy and his assumptions are wrong ... before quickly reverting back to his earlier assumptions. Today, decades after disabled people first engaged him in the spirit of rich philosophical debate, his positions have not especially changed. The assumption that "offensive speech" must be doing something right is.

I am deeply troubled by what I see happening in public philosophy when it comes to disability narratives. I am sure there is much more than what I see, in part because I listen to disabled philosophers. I hope The Stone, and other public spaces, do likewise.

RESOURCES: Eugenics and Institutionalization in Wisconsin History

I am giving a talk today at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. A few resources:

• My presentation
• A Google Cultural Institute introduction to the disability rights movement for which I was the lead writer.

EUGENICS IN WISCONSIN

• Persons sterilized in Wisconsin from 1931-1933 (499 individuals. Author advocates continuing).
• By Frank C. Richmond, State Director of Psychiatric Field Services, 1934
• How do you know if someone is "degenerate?"
• Go to an institution and observe
• A thesis submitted for the Degree of Master of Arts in the State University, Madison, Wis, 1918.
• Anne Rugg, One Hundred Years of Public Care for People With Mental Retardation in Wisconsin, 1871-1971, for Wisconsin Council on Developmental Disabilities and an MA at UWM.
• Eugenics and Institutionalization are always intertwined.
• Wisconsin Sterilization Act: 1913-1963 (repealed 1978)
• A Eugenics Timeline
• Wisconsin facts
• An interview with Phyllis Reske, who wrote "Policing the Wayward Women," on gender and eugenics in Wisconsin. 

Images from Reske's article: 1) Men with pro-eugenics signs. 2) Women posing with gambling machines.

How do we reckon with this history?

Resources assembled with assistance from Kit Mead, my RA for this project.

"Genetic Basis for Criminality" - Racism and Ableism

I'm always interested in tracking the ways that hatreds intersect and magnify. Here's a classic one, still vibrantly alive among American racists. The New Yorker published a long article on the racists behind the mustard-based South Carolina BBQ sauce. The family that developed it has a long history of racism, and the man behind "Piggie Park" is pretty extreme. He died, can the family adapt? 

"High" is the founder of the Southern Carolina Barbeque Association and he thinks all that racism stuff was overblown. My emphasis:

High spoke favorably of the Piggie Park’s new management—“Paul and Lloyd, and he’s got a daughter whose name I forget, cute girl. They’re real dedicated.” He had also thought highly of Maurice, who, he said, was always friendly and insisted on top-of-the-line ingredients. “He and Strom Thurmond were talking about all-natural thirty years ago,” he said, which seemed a bit like remembering Oswald Mosley for his advocacy of brown bread. I asked whether he thought Maurice’s political legacy posed a problem. “It wasn’t nearly as bitter as modern day makes it seem,” he said. He went on to talk about the trouble with racially interbred societies, the genetic basis of criminality, and his belief that the South should secede. After a disquisition that touched on everything from slavery (“It’s been around since Day One, and they talk about it in the Bible”) to Trump (“I happened to see him speaking to a crowd before he declared, and I came into the kitchen and I said, ‘Lovebug, that man’s gonna be President’ ”), he returned to the Piggie Park. “This is the most taken-for-granted barbecue house in America,” he said.

The assertion of a genetic basis of criminality is a core principle of eugenics, used to discriminate against disabled folks everywhere. It also informs "scientific racism," newly in vogue, but never really gone.

And here's a recent appearance of twitter from a man who works for PA Corrections and used to work for PA Probation.

Ok @fsnole1 & @cjprofman, I got a small taste of what you must get every day. I suggested crime is "partially genetic" and....oh boy! https://t.co/UPnOjVJNpN

— Bret Bucklen (@kbucklen) May 2, 2017

Abortion and Disability: Pro and Anti

NOS Magazine published an anti-choice and a pro-choice piece, back to back, last week. The anti was written by Ivanova Smith and makes this argument:

Even though some in the disability community don’t see this as a modern form of eugenics, I do. Eugenics is advocating for the death of those who are seen as a burden, as weaker or as an inconvenience. I understand there are situations where abortion is necessary evil, like if the mother life is at risk or if she was sexually assaulted However, I don’t feel a person’s life should be a choice because they are seen as a inconvenience or burden. We are human beings. even with the cases above a life was lost and that is sad and should be grieved.

I value my own life and life like me. We all just want to live, like any other human beings. I hope someday people will see this not as partisan issue, but a bipartisan issue that we can all agree on.

The problem here is that Smith mentions eugenics, but doesn't learn the lesson from it. The history of eugenics is not about providing widespread access to reproductive care to all women, regardless of their race, class, disability, trans or cis ... the history of eugenics is about the state asserting control over the bodies of disabled people.

Arguments for the coercive power of the state over reproductive access have never, and will never, work out well for disabled people. It is possible to assert the value of diverse human life without arguing for state coercion of women. It is, in fact, necessary to do so.

Fortunately, Shain Neumeier published a response that more than explains the problems with Smith's argument. My emphasis:

The hardest thing about the current framing of the abortion debate for disability justice advocates is that it forces us to choose between two of our core convictions: Inherent human worth and bodily autonomy. As a disabled person, an asexual non-binary person who was assigned female at birth, and an activist, I hate the ideas and circumstances that have put these principles in opposition to each other. Still, the choice is easy for me to make. My nearly absolute belief in bodily autonomy means nothing if I’d support forcing a person to remain pregnant and give birth against their will for any reason because of my own opposition to eugenics.

...

My opposition to eugenics comes as much from the coercion and violence with which it’s been carried out as from the underlying belief that disabled lives aren’t living. Legal or other limits on disability-selective abortion cannot and will not meaningfully address underlying systemic problems such as poverty and structural ableism in healthcare, education and employment that have perpetuated that belief and in doing so pitted disability and reproductive justice against each other in the first place. Their only purpose and effect will be to serve as a first step toward greater and more general restrictions on abortion and other forms of reproductive freedom.

A near-absolute committment to bodily autonomy  is, Neumeier argues, essential to the disability rights movement. Forcing women to give birth will be a wedge used to erode disability rights, not the salvation of disabled people.

There Ain't No Good Eugenics

Adam Cohen is the author of Imbeciles, an recent, widely read, book on the history of eugenics in early 20th century America. It's a solid book that about a history that isn't well known, and I'm glad he wrote it (though I am not sanguine about the movie deal based on it, but that's not his fault and is a separate story). 

What I'm not glad about is his recent op-ed in the L.A. Times on "good eugenics," which seems to miss the lessons of the history he synthesizes in his book. His thesis in the op-ed seems to  be: Due to cheap gene editing, eugenics is coming, but that might not be bad? He writes:

As a practical matter, though, the genie is already out of the bottle, and it is unlikely we could stop embryo editing if we wanted to. New advances are coming rapidly, and gene editing is only becoming easier, faster and cheaper.

Again, that need not be a bad thing. Twentieth century eugenics has rightly been called a “war on the weak” — its goal was to stop people with conditions like Huntington’s disease from reproducing. Twenty-first century eugenics can enable people with the Huntington’s gene to have children without it. The new eugenics can be a war for the weak.

The whole thing reads to me like a pitch to sell more copies of his book, now out in paperback. I get it. I, too, am finishing a book and hope to sell many copies. But I think he's taken precisely the wrong lesson from the history - an ableist regime, whether based on forced sterilization or gene editing, will always reflect the oppressive biases of the society that constructs it.

America - like most of the world - kills, incarcerates, and abuses its disabled citizens, especially those who are multiply marginalized by race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, or other categories of difference.

Any eugenic gene editing process that is constructed in our culture will reflect the ableist reality in which they are created.

In the future, disability will code for poverty, for non-white, for non-Western, and the oppressions will intensify.

I am not an optimist, even as I rally to fight against this future.

Disability Rights and Reproductive Rights

Elizabeth Picciuto and I collaborated on a piece in the Los Angeles Times today on abortion and disability rights in the age of Zika. Two key paragraphs:

We are parents of children with disabilities who are also pro-reproductive rights. David Perry’s 9-year-old son has Down syndrome. Elizabeth Picciuto’s 6-year-old son has Cri du Chat syndrome and microcephaly. Rather than limit women’s rights, we believe we must build a more understanding, accessible society that supports people with disabilities and provides services to parents. That’s how we can safeguard access to abortion while ensuring that it isn’t the only feasible option following a prenatal diagnosis.

And

The answer isn’t to force pregnant women to give birth. The best way to open up new possibilities for women after a prenatal diagnosis is to guarantee that disabled children are well-supported with the services they need, that they have adequate medical care, and access to great schools. If the Rubios and Pences of the world really want to make a difference, they could work to ensure that communities are empowered to welcome and include disabled people, not to shut them out.

Please read the whole thing!

Some of my previous pieces on reproductive rights and disability rights:

• For Parents of Children With Down Syndrome, ‘Abortion vs. Hardship’ Is a False Binary (Reproductive Health Reality Check, 11/18/2014)
• Down Syndrome and the Discourse of Abortion (Minneapolis/St. Paul Star Tribune, print edition 10/5/2008)
• Anti-Choice Legislators Try to Force Wedge Between Reproductive, Disability Rights Activists (Reproductive Health Reality Check, 1/16/15)

"My Canada Includes an Extra Chromosome"

Don't miss tomorrow night's SEASON FINALE of the RICK MERCER REPORT at 8:00pm on CBC (8:30NT). Here's Rick's Rant.
Posted by Rick Mercer Report on Monday, March 28, 2016

Gorgeous rant about the Canadian eugenic immigration laws currently getting exposure.

When people say, "I'll move to Canada if Trump wins," I think - not me, not unless I want to leave my son behind.

Story on the family threatened by these laws.

Also elsewhere around the world.

ISIL and the Murder of Disabled Children

This Facebook post from Mosul Eye, a source that I'm told has some track record of reliability, shows a video of disabled children (just hanging out, really), then claims the following:

Through monitoring and following the death incidents of children with Down's Syndrome and congenital deformities, we were able to learn that the Shar'i Board of ISIL issued an "Oral Fatwa" to its members authorizing them to "kill newborn babies with Down's Syndrome and congenital deformities and disabled children". The Fatwa was issued by one of ISIL's Shar'i judges, a Saudi judge named " Abu Said Aljazrawi".
The information indicate that most of the children born with Down's Syndrome are those of foreign fighters who married Iraqi, Syrian and Asian women. We recorded more than 38 confirmed cases of killing babies with congenital deformities and Down's Syndrome, aged between one week to three months. They were killed by either lethel injection or suffocation. Some of those killings took place in Syria and Mosul.
This displaced child from Mosul, ISIL issues a Fatwa to kill him.
As if it is not enough for ISIL to kill men, women and the elderly, and now, they kill children

Coverage in the West has linked this to Aktion T4 (Breitbart, here, is typical), the systematic Nazi murder of disabled people at the beginning of the Holocaust. Sarah Palin has weighed in, too, with her usual pure-ID politics: "Over my dead body," she says. Lots of coverage followed.

I think it's a mistake to compare ISIL to the Nazis. The murder of 38 disabled children is terrible. The murder of 200 Syrian children, as alleged in this video, is also monstrous (this story also compares ISIL to the Nazis). In the West, though, we like to compare everyone we hate to Nazis, but 20th-century western fascism is just one kind of evil, among many, and when we misunderstand our enemy it makes it harder to defeat them.

From the disability perspective, moreover, my community tends to parse everything through the western tradition of eugenics. Eugenics is both a historical and contemporary problem that emerged directly out of the western scientific tradition. I see it as a byproduct of the Enlightenment, although that's a post for another day (or, rather, just a long list of citations of pieces by smarter folks than I). It is possible that ISIL, with its European connections, is drawing from that eugenic tradition. But I don't think so.

This is not, unlike the video of the Syrian massacre, or the specific slaughter of wheelchair users in the Bataclan theater in paris, an explicit act of terror. There's no video of murdering disabled infants. This is not about exterminating the outsider or spreading fear + hate in the world. Rather, it's enabling ISIL fighters to murder their own disabled children, eliminating the perceived "unfit" from society.

That, sadly, is an ancient tradition. The infanticide of disabled children is fairly routine throughout history and continues around the world today. I just read that 98% of all abandoned children in China have disabilities, for example, but I'm not picking on China. Ableisms, often murderous ones, infuse all cultures in their own way.

None of this excuses ISIL's fighters who are murdering their children. I'm not even sure if the distinctions matter. But traditions of infanticide do vary, and I'm already seeing pro-forced birth Americans using this fact to support anti-abortion laws in the US while also promoting ground war in Syria.

Disability Abortion Narratives - The Stakes and Some Questions

UPDATE: I am leaving the essay below as is. I am increasingly persuaded by my smart interlocutors that the correct response to these kinds of essays is to offer empathy to the mother and to tell one's own story as best one can in one's own spaces. Thanks for all the feedback.

Websites and newspapers like publishing Down syndrome and other disability abortion narratives. They like them almost as much as Heroic Mother/Father/Child narratives. The pattern is pretty clear - a mother says that she got her diagnosis, was deeply upset, terminated, and remains upset about it but pretty sure she did the right thing.

Let's get some ground rules out. I am pro-information, pro-choice, and anti-eugenics. I believe a woman has the right to have an abortion under any circumstances, for any reason, at any time. I want doctors and counselors to have access to the best and most current information, to offer that information to women, but its her choice whether she listens, whether she takes it into account, and what she does with her body.

I am, though, concerned about our ongoing and intensifying eugenic age. I frequently say that what's going on with prenatal testing is just a test run for the future of human procreation, and it's a test we're largely failing. Gene editing is coming, and as Wired published, we need to figure out the ethics of that now! I believe our future is one in which disability codes increasingly for poverty and lack of access to modern medicine. I call it the "Gattaca scenario," and it doesn't make me happy.

These two above paragraphs require me to walk a very, very, fine line, and I make mistakes trying to do so all the time. When I read disability selection termination narratives, I always run the risk of rendering judgment for a woman making a choice I don't like, and that plays right into the hands of the anti-choice movement.

That said, the decision to write a public essay about one's abortion is different than the decision to have an abortion. I do think  - I hope and trust you, dear reader, will let me know if I'm wrong - that there's room to engage with the rhetoric of these essays without rendering judgement on the choice of the woman herself. That's what I'm going to try to do below.

Here's one from Yahoo! Parenting in February -  The mother got the diagnosis and then made a decision to abort. Again, her body, her choice. But here's how she describes the process.

I didn’t want to keep the baby. My child deserved better than a life of struggle and frustration due to a condition that he or she would never be able to change. Plus, there was no predicting the severity of the disorder — some children with Down Syndrome are able to feed themselves and attend school; others require more urgent and consistent care. Knowing that my husband and I wouldn’t live long enough to provide the necessary long-term care for our child was stressful, to say the least. I did not want him or her to ever feel lonely, lack independence, or be confined to a nursing home when we passed on.

“Do you remember the people who live in Nana’s nursing home — the ones who aren’t elderly?” I tried explaining to my husband. Mostly they just sat in their wheel chairs, staring into space. “No one comes to visit them,” Nana had said, adding that most had older parents who’d already passed on. My husband listened, then resumed his search...

 On our way home, we stopped at a sidewalk cafe. There I noticed an older couple with their son who appeared to have Down Syndrome. They were trying to prevent him from running out into the street so they could hand-feed him a slice of pizza and wipe his face with a napkin. Though he behaved like a rambunctious toddler, I wondered if he were a teenager or older (it’s often difficult to determine the age of someone with Down’s). I looked at my husband. He had noticed them too.

Notice there's no actual information there. There's supposition, fear, and a chance encounter on the street. This essay reinforces the notion that Down syndrome equals suffering, an argument that in fact vast reams of data contradict. The woman in question is, of course, under no obligation to engage with that data when making her decision. But is it fair to ask her to engage with it when writing an essay that has been shared almost 17,000 times on Facebook?

That's not a rhetorical question, but a genuine one, especially for my pro-choice friends. Is it fair? Or does it play into the hands of anti-choice ideology?

People are going to read this essay and some will cast judgment (the Down syndrome community is not happy about this piece). Others will sympathize and agree that a disabled life isn't worth living if you can avoid it.

I keep being drawn to this line: "I did not want him or her to ever feel lonely, lack independence, or be confined to a nursing home when we passed on." People feel lonely. People lack independence. Sometimes people live in institutions.

This week there was a similar piece on XOJane - "IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Terminated a Planned Pregnancy: How my second pregnancy became a mother's worst nightmare."

I called my husband and he headed home from the city. As I waited for him, I spent the next two hours googling this chromosomal abnormality on my phone and wondering "What did we do? How did this happen? Was there something we could have done?"

When my husband arrived, we met with the geneticist. She told us that the blood test I had taken had indicated that the chances were 99 percent that our child was affected by this condition and that we needed an amniocenteses to confirm. She then described in detail the obstacles that we, our son and, potentially, our daughter could face with the arrival of this baby. She explained that it was totally random and there was nothing we could have done and no way to cure it. I scheduled the amnio for the next day.
In the morning, we went back to maternal fetal medicine. I didn't even feel the needle in my stomach and couldn't look at the sonogram screen. On Friday the preliminary results were confirmed.

Over the next few days, we spoke to expert after expert and it became clear that we would have no choice.

Overall, this is better than the Yahoo piece, but again something is missing. She says it wasn't Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome), but it was a chromosomal abnormality. The essay works pretty hard at avoiding naming the abnormality, but I'm guessing it was one of the other trisomies - many of which produce non-viable fetuses or infants with a very short lifespan (Trisomy 18 gets news because Rick Santorum has a child with Trisomy 18 and writes about it in anti-choice media).

Again - is it wrong for me to want this essay to explain the parameters of "no choice?" Can I ask for that while still unambiguously supporting reproductive rights? I'd like to know what the condition was and why she felt she had no choice. I feel that writing this essay without that information leaves the reader feeling like any diagnosis of chromosomal abnormality, according to "experts," mandates termination. That's simply not true.

These are things I'm struggling with in my attempt to find that pro-choice and anti-eugenic rhetoric. I think it's vital work, not just for the Down syndrome community, but because this is the near future of human procreation.

I am extremely open to criticism on this one (ideally on everything, but especially here) from my pro-choice friends and readers. Does questioning the rhetoric of these narratives, these public essays, feed anti-choice ideology, especially when it comes from a male writer like myself?