``...However, according to the social model of disability that you advocate, it is not biological qualities of fetuses but social relations that disable individuals (temporarily or permanently or progressively), so it follows that it is impossible to "wipe out" the disabled through selective abortion without also abolishing disabling social relations...'' Yoshie
______
The key problem is that pre-natal screening, a medical application of biology, was only developed that is socially constructed to predict the appearance of Abby Normal then get rid of her. (Remember, Young Dr. Frankenstein?).
In other words, law and medicine have already socially constructed a list of biological attributes that make Abby a freak of nature and have invented a predictive means to deal with her appearance in advance. To wit, extermination. Notice, this is usually the answer when law and medicine get together. Can any one think of an instance where law and medicine enhance life rather than promote death?
Once that the foreknowledge of apparence has been socially constructed, it then appears as a biological, physical and objective fact. However, it is still a social construction that merely uses the predictive power of biological science to anticipate what it has virtually guarrantied in advance---that all Abbys will be freaks of nature.
It is a subtle argument and might not actually be logical, but it amounts to the idea that disability is always already socially constructed, whether through the medium of myth, religion, science, medicine, law, or economics. In other words you have to have decided in advance, what attribute to look for in genetics in order to find it and then design or discover markers for its predicted appearance.
At an epistemological level, science faces this same problem all the time. Is what we think is a phenomenon, a naturally occurring and self-cohering entity or not?
Remember the history of science is full of things that only existed in the minds of their investigators.
(gotta go see Jurassasic Park III)
Chuck Grimes