Sarah Palin's decision to give birth to her son Trig who has Down's syndrome was the most recent battle in an ethical debate that has been quietly brewing below the surface for years. We now have the technology to be able to determine if a fetus has down syndrome as early as 5 weeks into gestation with a combination of blood tests and ultrasound readings. Parents who are informed that they have a fetus with Down's Syndrome abort the fetus 90% of the time. If these trends continue it will not be long before Down's Syndrome is rare and few families experience the hardships of raising a developmentally disabled child. So this is a good thing, right? It turns out as always that progress is never as clearcut as that.
Many parents of people with Down's Syndrome feel that looking at just the negative aspects of raising a disabled child doesn't present the experience fairly. Is there joy as well as pain in parenting a disabled child? Could we as a society do more to support parents? What if in our age of genetic engineering, these children could have their genetic anomoly fixed? T he parent who wrote this article discusses that some physicians have even cited cost as a reason to abort fetuses with Down's Syndrome i.e. the costs of caring for the child would be high versus a normal child.
These are all very personal decisions that parents have every right to make for themselves. I have no ax to grind against abortion and my argument is not a moral one in the traditional sense. I don't feel that anyone should ever be compelled to be a parent to a child with special needs. I would never deny that this is a challenging task for anyone to take on. The arguments that involve measuring human lives in dollars makes me uncomfortable.
I (and both of my children) have a genetic illness that has the potential to cause a lot of suffering and illness. It causes lung and liver disease that sometimes necessitates lung and/or liver transplants which are very pricey endeavors. Where do we draw the line for acceptable and unacceptable genetic differences? How perfect is perfect enough? And what unintended consequences will arise from our pursuit of a perfection that is after all culturally defined and shifting in some cases? How long will it take us to move from eliminating disease to choosing eye colors, heights and IQs? The elimination of disease in humanity is objectively a wonderful goal. The trouble of course is that people are so much more beautifully complex and composed of so much more good stuff than their diseases.
I also worry, because I suspect that even genetic mutations that cause disease also carry some sort of advantage or protective factor with them that we may not adequately understand i.e. sickle cell anemia. We do great research to find and eliminate genetic defects, we don't often understand how even a defect can help in the complex web of processes that go on in our bodies. This is why we should continue tampering, but always with one eye out for unintended consequences and a drift away from health into vanity.