The real catastrophic defect

"I received a call from a woman whose physician had discovered catastrophic genetic and developmental defects in the fetus she is carrying . . .she called with great anxiety to find out whether . . . the "partial-birth" ban . . . would mean that she could not come to my office for help . . ." I quote from an article written last week by a painfully forthright abortion doctor. (http://slate.msn.com/id/2090215/)

I will not mask the depth of horror I felt; "What are "defects?" I wondered. "Does the baby lack limbs, consciousness, or senses? The doctor means that lacking these things makes a human defective; this judgment is abominable. Why is a 'defect' related to the value of this child? Do we merely value a specific genotype and set of physical capabilities? Isn't there something fundamentally worthy in a human that cannot be 'defective?'

I discussed this with a friend; and she made a good point. "What about the hard life it will have? Maybe the parents aren't ready for that difficulty."

The abortion doctor states that the pregnancy was "profoundly desired" (perhaps not profoundly enough to include the possibility of an 'imperfection'). But the objection has merit, and applies to the abortion argument in general. What about the "hard life?" Do we protect children by ending their lives before they can emerge from the womb?

Superficially, it makes sense to intervene. By "hard life," people commonly mean a life incapable of enjoyment, with obstacles like poverty, lack of education and physical disability. As products of educated, economically self-sufficient families, this ethic that an unenjoyed life is not a life worth having feels reasonable.

It does make sense, until we ask the entire Third World whether their lives are valueless because many of them don't have an opportunity to attain education or comfort by American standards. It would be offensive and wrong to suggest that Third World lives are less valuable than a comfortable American life simply because they often lack the enjoyment we have. Perhaps, then, life possesses intrinsic value, despite the difficult circumstances or the absence of happiness. Would you tell a poor, uneducated, or diseased person, "You should never have lived. Your life is hard, and you are unhappy, so you would have been better off had you never been born." Clearly not; our American ideal of a happy life is artificial and classist: it depends upon our status atop the economic hierarchy. This classism is degrading and immoral; would you tell a Third World individual, "I would have aborted you, because relative to American standards, your life would have been unhappy and therefore worthless?"

The insidious truth behind this elitism is that we mean to homogenize humanity; we pretend to value differences, then turn and eliminate an "uncomfortable" life. The real "catastrophic defect" lies in this faulty reasoning. We decry genocide, then nod understandingly when one feels incapable of supporting a "defective" life. The unspoken assumption is horrifying: "That's too hard! Let's purge humanity of these defects-the disabled wouldn't want to live anyway!" This is elitism on the grandest scale; we arbitrarily choose a life unlike our own, and call it worthy of death. What happened to the ethos of the "noble struggle?" Why did the couple with the genetically "defective" baby give up so easily on that life?

"But the fetus isn't a life!" my friend responded. It's certainly alive, in that it is composed of cells that are living, and function together as an organism with a unique, human DNA sequence. It also often has a blood type that differs from the mother's; Clearly, this life possesses an identity separate from its mother (suggesting that abortion is not a question of a woman's right to her own body; something fundamentally unique has been created).

So a fetus is alive and human; yet some refuse to call it a human life! Some require consciousness, self-awareness, or some arbitrary intellectual capability for a definition of human life. What of the disabled adults who lack consciousness, intellect, and understanding, if we agree that to "purify" the human race of the disabled would constitute a genocide? Are the disabled not human because they differ from the norm in their capabilities? A fetus similarly lacks capabilities, but most would develop towards the norm! I find no reason to distinguish between life inside and outside the womb. The claim that abortion is amoral (not morally right or wrong) because the fetus is not a human life is false; the temptation to quietly still the beating heart of one of our "problems" is not amoral, it is genocidal.

I do respect the concern for suffering behind the "hard life" argument, and I don't intend to sever emotion from the debate. I have two disabled brothers; one lost his sight at ten years old, and another was born with cerebral palsy and mental impairment. I have witnessed the suffering and struggle that does occur in a nontraditional human life, both psychologically and physically.

I remember watching the second brother via sonogram. Only a small pocket of fluid around his head let him breathe. I know now that most parents would have aborted him. He was born prematurely, and was as vulnerable in the incubator as he'd been hours earlier inside my mother. My first instinct was to touch him; I put my palm across his tiny back, and he shivered violently. I put a finger on his palm, and he instinctively grasped it. I knew he craved protection and love, though he couldn't express that verbally. I've worked hard to provide that for Bradley, and my parents have worked even harder. I'll never tell anyone that caring for a 'disabled' life is easy or even always manageable, but I defy anyone to watch those sonograms and suggest that he could justifiably have been aborted. You could never justify killing my brother who was blinded after birth, nor could you justify killing my palsied brother before birth. It's murder either way.

Reject the temptation of the easy, class-derived assumption that a hard or unhappy life isn't worth preserving. It's a function of our unconscionable wealth, and is not intellectually sound. As the modern era has shown, even those born into "normal," healthy, comfortable homes will confront hardship. It is not incidental that mental disturbances like depression plague so many; money does not, we find, equal happiness. The parents I mentioned at the beginning chose to eliminate their baby; what will they do with their next struggle? Will they divorce? Become depressed? Commit suicide? Fortitude is a lost virtue.

Matthew Dysart is a senior majoring in English.