Comments on: Eugenic Abortion

By: T Lieberman

T Lieberman — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:18:32 +0000

Christina & Barry: When an woman decides to abort the fetus she is carrying, we can’t assume how she feels about other people raising disabled children. We can only assume that she, personally, does not want to raise that particular child. Her decision might be based on her unwillingness to see the child suffer, or on her inability to afford the child’s healthcare, which are not the same as a belief that the world should be “rid” of disabled people. A movement to influence women to choose abortion may well exist, but we cannot make that assumption simply because many women are choosing abortion. We would need more information that was not supplied in the original blog post.

Gatsby: It seems unlikely that Israelis would starve unwanted newborns, especially because abortion is legal there. According to Wikipedia, each abortion must be approved by a committee. One acceptable reason is a suspected birth defect; 17% of abortions are approved for this reason. Israel seems to have the same overall abortion-per-capita rate as the US. The 2008 population estimates (men and women of all ages) are 7.3 million for Israel and 304.1 million for the US. The 2003 government reports of the number of abortions performed are 19,500 for Israel and 854,122 for the US. So, given that abortion is just as common in Israel as in the US, and that fetal abnormalities are a legal justification for abortion, there would be no more reason to starve babies in Israel than there would be here in the US.

By: Gatsby Blastyn

Gatsby Blastyn — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:33:10 +0000

Has anyone heard of the “special diet” in Israel?
I don’t know how true this is or not. But a friend of mine who lived in Israel for 5 years noticed that he hadn’t come across any physically disabled or mentally disabled children. He raised the concern with the family he was staying with and they informed him about the “special diet”…. which if I understand correctly involved starving those unfit children.
Again, this could be complete hogwash - but I was curious if anyone heard of it.

By: Barry Carey

Barry Carey — Mon, 12 May 2008 02:15:52 +0000

Eugenics is a word that has been applied in a wide variety of circumstances. I am not uncomfortable in applying it in this case, understanding that it also has other applications.

This is not an individual family planning decision with which we are dealing, by the way. As noted by Christina, there is a concerted effort to abort Down’s Syndrome patients in order to decrease the incidence of this disease and make the human race “better.” This is eugenics.

By: Christina

Christina — Sun, 11 May 2008 21:35:47 +0000

The point, Lieberman, is that both the mother in choosing abortion, and the doctor in encouraging abortion, and society in tolerating abortion, are in the case of Down syndrome doing it for eugenic reasons — to rid the world of people that they, personally, consider inferior.

It was eugenics that took abortion from an abomination to a right in the US. I’ve been spending the past weeks delving through historic newspaper archives, and in the 1960’s there’s a sudden change of tone. All of a sudden, the abortion stories are no longer of women dying and doctors getting arrested. The stories are all about how horrible it is that it’s hard to get women through loopholes in the law to allow them to abort.

Why the sudden switch? Two words: Thalidomide. Rubella.

Society was so squeamish about “defective” people being born that the perception shifted. Abortion was no longer a horror: babies were. Inferior babies. Defective babies. Unsightly babies. Yuck!

And this was back before any kind of prenatal testing could tell if the baby was one of these “monsters” or not. Just the suspicion that the baby might be of the undesirable kind was reason enough to take his or her life.

We can say that back in the 1960s we weren’t embracing tolerance and diversity. What’s our excuse now? If your body is different, or your mind works differently, or you have some genetic quirk, it’s off to the pathology lab with you, kid! What’s our excuse for that?

By: T Lieberman

T Lieberman — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:36:15 +0000

Just a question: Is the word “eugenics” normally applied to free individual decisions about one’s own pregnancy?

My understanding is that, given a distinction between voluntary family planning and compulsory family planning, “eugenics” usually refers to the latter. Not sure if you really want to erode that distinction.