Quality of life…
…can sometimes be delivered in unexpected ways. Not by getting the perfect child that every parent dreams of, but the imperfect one who helps them discover the strength and beauty of their own endurance.”
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Hi Uma,
I’m not sure what precisely you liked about this essay. It seems to me to be full of melodramatic statements, a lot of really inane rhetoric but not much substance. What exactly did you like about it?
And what does Padmanabhan want precisely? Does she want government enforced guidelines that forbid any prospective parents from aborting children with, say, Downs Syndrome? Well, that’s fair enough but then what to make of this: “But do we really need a court’s definition to know that a beating heart is an absolute sign of life?” What rubbish.
Regulating abortion is a tricky business. On one hand, there’s the woman’s right to choose, and on the other, there’s the problem (in India at least) of selective abortions of female fetuses. Now does Padmanabhan want to add to this the abortion of a fetus with a congenital disease and complicate already existing abortion laws?
It’s not that I object to her stance, which is fair. What I object to is the Olympian tone of outrage as if parents all over the world need Manjula Padmanabhan to tell them what is wrong and what isn’t. Let’s leave it to them to decide, no? How is this piece supposed to help policy-makers who are grappling with the framing of abortion laws?
Last, but not the least, I’m not sure whether Padmanabhan would want abortions at all but the piece could well be read as advocating banning ALL abortions, no? Her argument about beating hearts could well be stretched endlessly.
Comment by scritic — August 7, 2008 @ 2:16 pm
With advances in interventional therpaies not so evolved, there is a point that the advances in pre-natal diagnosis is primarily about the choice to have a normal healthy baby and the choice to abort if otherwise. The thing that I see good in that article is the drive for a message that an abnormal child should be thought of as acceptable as a normal child. This is not to suggest that am supporting Manjula to tell what is right for parents to do. But looking at the larger public discourse on this topic, it certainly makes one feel that this perspective is somewhere not seen very apparent. Hence an article or piece advocating that is a welcome thing is my humble opinion.
Comment by Magesh — August 11, 2008 @ 8:44 am
Let not the courts decide. The decision should be of parents.
http://www.decisioncare.org
Comment by Indian — August 11, 2008 @ 1:48 pm
Uma, I didn’t really like this article. Yes, children can bring joy in unexpected ways and yes, there are many parents who may not abort a fetus with congenital issues. But that has no bearing on legislating abortion or forbidding a woman to choose whether to carry a child to term or not when that child is inside her. She has that right till the child is born, i.e. when our society declares it has a life and is a separate individual. We may feel squeamish about aborting a late term fetus because it is more like a human being than say an early term fetus but that doesn’t mean the tail (emotion) should wag the dog (morality/legality).
Furthermore, the reasons she gives for declaring abortion tantamount to murder have no factual basis. Heart beating? You can hear the heart beat way before the 20th week. The fetus has a personality in the seventh month? Has this been measured? I would like to know when exactly that personality develops. Psychology shows that babies have no self-identity till around 18 months of age. And even the kicking/quickening starts well before the 20th week - its just that the mother feels it around the 20th week because of the abdominal walls thickness. She is going by an arbitary definition of viability and calling it ‘life’.
And as for all those anecdotes about not abortng Beethoven or Stephen Hawking or an IIT genius, I think people who argue this way don’t really talk about probabilities only about these vivid cases to confirm their basic intuition.
Comment by n! — August 12, 2008 @ 3:21 am