A blinking cursor on a blank computer screen can only offer so much feedback. That’s why I found myself sitting across from my friend Grant in a bustling Waffle House on Monday morning.
After the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, I needed a sounding board.
Here we were in 2006 with senators blustering and interest groups organizing over one topic more than any other: abortion. Thirty-three years after it became the law of the land, Roe is still the elephant in the womb.
Why are we seemingly incapable of moving on? Why is the idea of a separate peace regarding abortion so unacceptable to activists on all sides? I asked Grant how I could begin to find such answers, and he just chuckled and wished me luck.
Then, almost casually, he began to tell a story. It seems that when Grant’s mother was pregnant with him 22 years ago, his older brother was diagnosed with polycystic kidney disease.
Grant’s brother had also been born with some other birth defects, so doctors recommended that Grant’s parents see a geneticist.
They obliged, and the geneticist made a cursory examination of the family’s situation. She determined that there was a substantial risk that Grant would be born with defects similar to his brother’s and recommended that he be aborted. Grant’s parents didn’t even consider it.
“It wasn’t an option because they knew they had another child [from the moment Grant was conceived], and they didn’t want to extinguish that life,” Grant said.
At a follow-up visit to the geneticist a few weeks later, the other shoe dropped: Grant’s brother’s condition was a genetic “fluke.” On the basis of a false positive, the doctor had made a recommendation based on Grant’s potential quality of life. The notion of the sanctity of life was of little or no concern.
A rare case? Hardly. Most studies suggest that more than 80 percent of all babies suspected of having Down syndrome are aborted, according to a Washington Post article from April 2005. This is despite the vast improvements in quality of life over the past several decades for those living with Down syndrome. Bioethicist Kevin Elliott, who holds a joint appointment in the University’s philosophy department and at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, notes the difficult ethical concerns tied to this issue.
“Some of the folks who might not be as concerned about abortion might be worried if we are systematically aborting certain groups of people because there is an issue of justice involved,” Elliott said.
Our American emphasis on individual rights only complicates the matter.
“This makes it tough to address these issues on a societal level,” Elliott noted. “It could result in a society we don’t feel comfortable with as a whole.”
Bioethicist James Taylor, a professor at the College of New Jersey, said that pragmatic concerns often play a large role in these decisions
“[T]he fundamental ethical question here is whether the decision to abort would result in the most human well-being, both for the fetus and for its family,” Taylor wrote in an e-mail. “I suppose that this shows that persons often make moral decisions on the basis of utilitarian considerations – that they try to maximize well-being [for all involved].”
Yet that itself is a troubling area. Who decides what constitutes “well-being”? Grant’s brother recently graduated from Emory law school and is practicing in Baton Rouge, while Grant, soon to have a master’s degree under his belt, will start law school in the fall. Would their parents have been wise to heed the doctors’ recommendations?
And if Down syndrome babies are deemed undesirable, what constitutes an “acceptable” baby?
Our continuing collective response to these thorny issues will reflect our true values. The many questions in this ongoing debate, drawn into sharp focus in cases of infants with birth defects, demand that we give an account of who we are as humans and why we’re here on earth.
The philosophy that underlies Roe v. Wade has given its answer, and it is grim.
For the last few decades, we the people have looked for those answers in a Corinthian-style building on the corner of First and East Capitol streets in Washington, D.C. That we have not resolved any of the moral and political questions surrounding abortion suggests we’re looking in the wrong place. But we are a stubborn people.
Perhaps that’s why on Sunday morning folks will again gather on the steps of that temple of American orthodoxy, there to re-enact the passion of the past 33 years beneath an engraving that proclaims, with increasing irony, “equal justice under law.”
Grant’s mother looked inside herself, quite literally, and knew the truth.
May we not rest until we too have acknowledged it.
Josh is a mass communication senior.
Contact him at jbritton@lsureveille.com