By Dave Andrusko
In a blog written over the weekend, bioethicist Wesley Smith talks about a program that recently aired on a program called “Freakonomics” called “Misadventures in Baby Making.” One of the participants is Steven D. Levitt, who along with his colleague John Donahue once argued (as Levitt explained on the program) “that legalized abortion led to decreases in crime.” We wrote about that bogus connection several times.
Wesley focuses his blog on that portion of the show. Not surprisingly, although the linkage has been delinked and debunked numerous times, Levitt still holds to the contention which is a kind of poster only Planned Parenthood could love: if you’re unwanted, you’re headed for a life of crime. You may or may not be better off dead than unwanted, Levitt and Donahue argued, but “society” is.
But to me the other two other segments were equally or more revealing. The first dealt with the 160 million “missing women,” missing because their gender was identified via ultrasound and they were aborted.
The host of the show was kind enough not to get into the grill of Mara Hvistendahl, the author of “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,”and a feminist who refuses to call for a blanket rejection of sex-selection abortion. Just kind of a matter of fact discussion about the ultimate exercise of sex discrimination.
However the third episode I found riveting. Stephen Quake is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and “He’s developed a new prenatal test, inspired by his own impending parenthood.” We’ve written about this numerous times. It is a simple, non-invasive blood test that can tell parents early in pregnancy if their child has Down syndrome.
Quake had the best of motives. His wife was pregnant and over 35 and he didn’t her to go through the stress of having an amniocentesis which not only has a tiny but real risk of miscarriage but includes “fretting while one waits for the results.” But to listen him avoid/sidestep/tap dance around the 100% certain results—more babies with Down syndrome aborted—is to watch evasion practiced at the highest level.
Back into a corner in the end, in effect Quake says, “You think this is bad?” Increasingly there will be more and more things we will know about the unborn child. Quake says
“It would be horrible to think that people are going to take some sort of action because, you know, their baby’s eyes weren’t going to be the color they wanted, or they’re not going to be as tall as they wanted.”
Yes, it WOULD be. But, not to worry,
“These are things that you could presumably figure out pretty early on. And in practice I think it is a sort of self-correcting phenomenon. You know, it is challenging enough to conceive, especially these days, that people I’m hoping will not want to end it for trivial reasons.”
He ends with this:
“That’s where I hope it’s all going to equilibrate.”
That he can say that in the face of an abortion rate of 90% for babies prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome is the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.