Because we can never get enough genetic purity talk, now can we? Helen Rittelmeyer has a thoughtful response to my earlier post:
The decision to carry a mentally retarded child to term means something different in a world where ninety percent of women in that position choose not to. In such a world, the assumption will be that the mother is either a well-to-do woman who can comfortably afford to have an extraordinary child—call it "Variations on a Theme of Angelina Jolie"—or a pro-lifer whose (self-imposed) absolutist beliefs are responsible for her situation. It will be fair to assume that no normal woman would have borne the child since, after all, normal women don't. The child is transformed from something his mother accepted to something the woman brought on herself.You're not going to hear me denying the effect of societal pressure on women's reproductive choice. It plays a huge role, and it's a big problem. But surely legal changes - of the kind Michael Gerson and Sarah Palin want to enact - encumber women's choices far more than cultural pressures. If your primary interest is in expanding women's autonomy - as mine is - allowing legal elective abortions is a far better policy move than criminalizing them in the name of combatting peer pressure. Ideally, neither constraint would exist, but given the choice societal pressures are far preferable to state-enforced mandatory pregnancy.If I were still an undergraduate, I would turn to this thought experiment: let's say you don't want to comply with some request of mine; if I give a dollar in exchange for compliance to everyone else but you, then you should definitely stand your ground, but if I give a million dollars to everyone else, then it begins to look like coercion. Eugenic abortion changes the stakes of having a child with disabilities, and to invoke autonomy as the bright line between "real" and soft eugenics only makes sense in a world where the decisions of others have no effect on me.
Maybe Rittelmeyer is right to go on to categorize aborting fetuses with Down's as "real eugenics". I'm not interested in getting into a fight over semantics. But selective abortion lacks the moral harms that made earlier American eugenics attempts so reprehensible. Compulsory sterilization hurts someone. Selective abortion doesn't. If both fall into the "eugenics" box, so be it, but then the term isn't a universal pejorative anymore.
