Something I’m trying to sort out
August 30th, 2008Sarah Palin is gettings heaps of praise from the right and the left for giving birth to a child with Down Syndrome this April inspite of prenatal testing indicating the defect. Unlike other possible birth defects, Down Syndrome isn’t something that tests predict will happen; the results are certain, and about 90% of pregancies are terminated when Down Syndrome is found.
This is a seriously prickly question for me, and presumably was for her as well. As a 44-year-old woman, the chance that any child she delivers will have Down Sydrome is higher than one in twenty. What are the moral considerations of bearing children at her age without considering abortion if Down Syndrome is detected? Is the fact that she’d already had four children a mitigating factor? Does it matter whether or not she was aware of the risks beforehand, or whether she considers contraception or surgically-induced sterility moral?
This isn’t a question about Palin, per se, but rather one that applies to a relatively narrow (but large) group of women to who have access to (and use) prenatal testing, oppose abortion in cases of severe birth defects (and follow through on that opposition when it applies to themselves), are at least a bit older than 40 (when the chance of trisomy 21 rapidly balloons from well under 1% to nearly 10%), and have already had healthy children recently. It’s inevitably got to be a tortured decision to make, and one that implies a huge amount of future personal sacrifice for yourself and your family, but it doesn’t strike me as something that ought to be universally lauded despite the bravery involved without considering the moral implications of her choice.