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Wanting a retro-active abortion

Feb 29, 2012

By Dave Andrusko

Rick and Karen Santorum, with their daughter, Bella

First, a tip of the hat to the pro-life blog JivinJehoshaphat for both a link to and a particularly astute insight into an essay that appeared at Salon.com.

It would be difficult to come up with a harder hard case than that posed by Emily Rapp. Her nearly two-year-old son, Ronan, has Tay-Sachs, an awful disease that is inevitably fatal.

There are as many moving parts in this complicated essay as you’d find in a Lamborghini engine. Ms. Rapp’s essay combines an attack on GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum for flatly stating that prenatal tests lead to an increase in abortions with her own straightforward admission that had she known he would have Tay-Sachs, she would have aborted Ronan! (Rapp had a number of tests, including one for Tay-Sachs “which did not detect my rare mutation.”)

You don’t doubt for a second Rapp’s utter sincerity when she writes, “I love my son more than any person in the world and his life is of utmost value to me”–any more than you would doubt she means it when she writes, “I believe it would have been an act of love to abort him.”

At some level Rapp obviously sees, if not the contradiction, at least the tension. Her way out is to tell us

“Prenatal testing provides information, a value-less act. I maintain that it is a woman’s right to choose what to do with the information that attaches value and meaning, and that this choice is—and must be—directly related to that individual’s experiences.”

Just so we’re clear on this: information is neutral, neither good nor bad.  The “value and meaning” is attributed to it by the individual out of her individual experience. In the abortion context that attributing is done exclusively by the mother.

JivinJehoshaphat  observes

“I wish pro-choice advocates felt the same way about ultrasounds and scientifically accurate information about prenatal development. However, most seem to feel that it’s ‘extreme’ to provide that kind of information and allow women to ‘attach value and meaning’ to it. Isn’t it strange of how information that could lead to the decision to have an abortion is so valued in the pro-choice community while information which could lead to a choice not to have an abortion is so despised?”

What makes the situation even more complex is that had Rapp been conceived a few years later, she might never have been born. She writes

“Here’s another set of truths for the moral and ethical mix: I was born with a physical deformity in the age before the evolution of advanced ultrasound technology that may have detected it. My mom did not have a choice about terminating her pregnancy, although when I was born and she was told that I might be retarded, that I might never walk, and that given these possibilities she might want to consider institutionalizing me, she probably wished she’d had the choice.’

Does that give Rapp reason to pause? No.

“Regardless of what she may or may not have decided had she been possessed of all the information prior to my birth, regardless of the fact that none of the doctor’s warnings had any truth to them, it would have been her choice to make.”

In other words, “What’s at stake here is not the issue of testing, but the issue of choice.“ Process, not result–the default defense for abortion.

Most of the online responses to the essay spew venom at anyone who would question her absolute condemnation of those who disagree with her absolute position. A few dare to mention that most of the victims of prenatal testing are children with Down syndrome, whose lives are better and longer today than ever before. This at the same time roughly 90% of babies prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted.

No one doubts that Rapp’s situation—and Ronan’s—is difficult beyond words. The question is would killing him have been “an act of love”?

Rapp’s “problem” is that she did not know Ronan would be born with a devastating disease. Had she known, problem solved. She tells us she would have aborted—“Without question and without regret, although this would have been a different kind of loss to mourn and would by no means have been a cavalier or uncomplicated, heartless decision.”

Her conclusion is

“I believe that we need a more nuanced discussion [than Santorum’s pro-life perspective] about what quality of life is, and that it should be a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy when the path of her child’s life is as compromised—and as terrible—as my son’s.”

How severe would Ronan’s disease needed to have been to warrant an abortion? (See Down syndrome.) What if Rapp knew he would be fine until, say, age 20? What if she knew in advance that at age 30 Ronan would be in a car accident and rendered in a condition similar to the one he is in now? Or knew that a medical malady was programmed into his genes but would not kick in for decades?  At the “end of life,” the same sorts of questions could be posed.

JivinJehoshaphat takes that line of inquiry in a direction I’d missed:

“Rapp also believes killing her child in the womb would have been an ‘act of love’ because it would have stopped his suffering. I wonder if she thinks killing him now (he’s nearly 2 and beautiful) would also be an act of love since it would also end his suffering?

“But that’s the sort of obvious question abortion advocates never really answer or even seem to consider, isn’t it?”

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Categories: pre-natal testing