Did I put the title of this post a bit too strongly? I don't think so. I could have said instead, with perfect accuracy, "The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends killing imperfect babies. Somehow "killing" is a stronger word than "aborting," though there is no difference between the two. Abortion means killing. It never means anything else. Dean Barnett, who has Cystic Fibrosis, feels the poignancy of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' recommendation keenly. He writes:
A disquieting report comes to us today from The Brave New World front. The Washington Post reports that The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists “is urging pregnant women to take note of its new recommendation that doctors offer to screen them for Down syndrome, no matter how old they are.” The College does little to disguise the reasons for their latest “urging.” As the Post puts it,
“The ultimate decision about screening, though, should remain with the mother, the doctors said. After all, she must decide whether to continue with a pregnancy if there are indications the child will have a birth defect.”
Stories like this, and the queasy feelings they generate, are nothing new for me. I’ve been, if not on the frontlines of similar dust-ups, close enough to smell the gunpowder. Here’s my tale.
AS MOST OF THE READERS OF THIS SITE KNOW, I HAVE the genetic lung disease Cystic Fibrosis. When I was born in
1967, the life expectancy for a bouncing baby boy with CF was eight years. Thanks to much better medical treatment, the average life expectancy for a baby born with CF today is in the mid-30’s. Nevertheless, CF remains a killer, and at best a terrible and painful burden for the parents of a CF patient.
When I was a teenager, the people running the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation came up with a “cure” for CF that could have only risen from the moral muck of the 1960’s and 70’s. They would breed the disease out of existence. Some time around 1980, the Foundation funded the search for and the eventual discovery of a pre-natal test for the disease. The plan was that parents who had a baby/fetus with CF would of course choose an abortion. Since children with CF would no longer be born, the disease would no longer exist. It would be “cured.” Sort of.
I knew most of the people who were then on the CF board; one of them was my father who I of course love dearly. He, too, thought this was a good idea. At some point my older brother pressed him if this meant he and my mother would have aborted me had they known I would have CF. My father reassured him that it wouldn’t have been a big deal, since I would have been reincarnated in the next baby they conceived. Except I would be better. I wouldn’t have that damn disease anymore.
I didn’t buy this logic. (Neither did my brother.) Even as a teenager, I didn’t like the idea that the next me would be aborted. With more skin in the game than the typical adolescent, I became one of the youngest and most ardent pro-life advocates in a liberal town that was lost in the moral confusion of the era.
In a post a couple of weeks ago, I expressed sympathy for people who had reasons to want an abortion but didn’t have the moral clarity to see that having one was the wrong thing to do. These comments upset a lot of people. I think the reason I might have more sympathy for the flawed process that leads a person to embrace abortion is because I’ve seen it up close in the people I love.
I don’t mean to be hard on either my father or his fellow members of the board who thought they had a good idea with this plan. They were good people doing the best they could. They were all parents of children with CF. Many of them had lost children with CF. While I’ve always felt what they tried to do was very wrong, I also have sympathy for them as people who at a particular point in history lost their way.
Happily, there was little harm done, or a lot less than was originally hoped for. It turned out that a tiny percentage of parents aborted their babies because the babies were going to be “Cystics.” I don’t know if anyone still formally tracks these things, but I remember from the late 1980’s that the percentage of parents who wanted a baby enough to do pre-natal screening statistically never aborted that baby because it had CF. The percentage either approached or literally was zero. What deaths there have been join the tens of millions of similar tragedies caused by a great society that is sometimes narcissistic and blind.
Naturally, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists didn’t and doesn’t take this lack of enthusiasm for eugenics lightly. While the CF Foundation thankfully shook off this rubbish decades ago, the medical community has been more resolute in its moral obtuseness.
Even today on the College’s website, you can find the College none-too-subtly cheerleading for aborting CF babies. In a booklet that addresses pre-natal testing for CF and includes an FAQ that’s nowhere near as fun as one of mine, the College advises:
Treatments (for CF) are costly and may be burdensome without adequate health insurance. Cystic fibrosis cannot be treated before birth. The purpose of having this information about your developing baby is so you can prepare yourself to care for a child with special health care needs or so you can terminate the pregnancy.
Nice, no? It sounds like if the college had its way, I never would have been born to create any of those fun FAQs. After more than 25 years of reading and hearing this kind of stuff, it still retains its capacity to shock.
SO FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES, what does this mean? I can only speak personally. It means I’m pro-life. It means my top priorities are winning enough moral arguments that we reduce abortions as a precursor to eliminating them. It means I want to save as many lives as possible from being aborted which I think will be directly correlated to how morally persuasive pro-life people can be. It means I want politicians who will be pro-life, but I’m not into Pyrrhic victories or tilting at windmills. It means I want abortion foes to change the minds of people who are pro-choice rather than berate them.
In many ways, we should thank the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for bringing an unwitting moral clarity to the debate. The College has no problem with ending a pregnancy for matters of convenience or because the child will have “birth defects” that will disappoint its parents. A recognition that life is precious, and that an “imperfect” child is worth valuing as much as a “perfect” child, is nowhere to be found in the College’s amoral calculations.
Three and a half decades after Roe v. Wade, this is where we are. Sadly. Tragically.