May 13, 2010
A Moral And Ethical Dilemma For Abortion Rights Supporters?
What a conundrum for liberals who support any and all abortions at any time for any reason under the rubric of "pro-choice" freedoms.  Liberals are also supposedly for diversity.  Well, here's the problem:  If a woman is free to abort the human being developing in her body for any whim, shouldn't she be able to abort the baby if it has been genetically tested and the results are not "pleasing?"The New York Times  "Week in Review" "Prenatal Tests + Abortion = ???" (May 13, 2007) dealt with this growing concern about pro-choice abortion morality and ethics: "Abortion rights supporters - who believe that a woman has the right to make decisions about her own body-have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable.  And many are finding that, while they support a woman's right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don't want to have a particular baby." Two "liberal values" are on a collision course.  The first is, of course, the right to terminate fetal life at will.  The second is the freedom to abort children on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, intelligence, and future illnesses (certain cancers and arthritis) when the liberal mantra is supposedly "pro diversity." "Kirsten Moore [the article continues], president of the pro-choice Reproductive Health Technologies Project, said that when members of her staff recently discussed whether to recommend that any prenatal tests be banned, they found it impossible to draw a line - even at sex selection, which almost all found morally repugnant.  'We all had our own zones of discomfort, but still couldn't quite bring ourselves to say 'here's the line, firm and clear' because that is the core of the pro-choice philosophy,' she said.  'You can never make that decision for someone else." This puts pro-abortion liberals in a quandary.  As more pre-natal genetic testing becomes available, more folks will have the ability to "design" a baby.  They will probably choose against much of the core constituency that political liberals have worked hard on to fortify their ideological base. Very interesting.

Posted by Staff at 12:58 AM