Rights are for the living
The disability rights commission has made a big mistake in allying itself with anti-abortion fanatics
Polly Toynbee Friday August 24, 2001 The Guardian
An astonishing statement has just emerged from the new disability rights commission. It claims a key section of the 1967 Abortion Act is offensive and discriminatory. The act allows late terminations - after 24 weeks - only if there is a significant risk of a baby being born with a severe disability. The disability rights commission statement says this "reinforces negative stereotypes of disability; and there is substantial support for the view that to permit terminations at any point during a pregnancy on the ground of risk of disability, while time limits apply to other grounds in the Abortion Act, is incompatible with valuing disability and non-disability equally". The sheer breathtaking nonsense of this makes it difficult to know where to begin.
Of all the mountainous problems that this new commission has to confront in fighting for fair treatment for disabled people, to waste their time on this angels-on-pins theology of disability is a dismal beginning. True, Life, the anti-abortion group, asked for an opinion from the commission, and passions run high on this among some disability groups. So the statement starts with the entirely sensible judgment that the relevant section of the 1967 act "is not inconsistent with the Disability Discrimination Act since the latter is concerned with the rights of living persons". They should have left it there - simple, clear-cut, end-of-story. Foetuses are not people and the commission should have sent Life back to its tiny rump of religious fanatics, the small minority still opposing abortion.
Instead, the commission's statement promises that it "will be pursuing these points with the secretary of state for health, the medical profession and other relevant organisations". It claims that pregnant women with foetal abnormalities are not given information to help them make informed choices on keeping their babies. The commission's press notice offers just one case study for interview - a woman who went ahead with a pregnancy after discovering her child had Down's syndrome and now feels she made the right choice. All this might have come hot off the pro-Life presses.
Where to start? In recent years the militant disability movement has developed a whole new confident and strident identity - no more pathetic cripples pleading in soppy charity ads, but a strong demand for equal rights in the tradition of the battles for black, women's and gay rights. Tipping themselves out of wheelchairs and rolling in red paint outside Downing Street was brilliantly effective protest theatre. After women's pride, black pride and gay pride, proud-to-be-disabled seems to make sense too. But each of these four campaigns is different. Each group's identity, cohesiveness and claim to victimhood is based on markedly different circumstance. Disability campaigners have over-identified with other civil rights issues, talking as if they were a race or a gender.
Some deaf people speak of sign language as a special culture to be preserved, some suggesting that if all deafness could be cured it would be a form of genocide against the "race" of signers. For this reason, some disability campaigners consider the abortion of damaged foetuses to be genocide against the imaginary race of disabled people. Some even dispute genetic treatments that might cure disability in foetuses: "cure" suggests not difference but imperfection.
On anti-abortion rallies, pro-Life groups always push forward a battalion of disabled people to plead that they would not be here if their parents had aborted them. Do we wish them dead, they challenge? This kind of madness is hard to argue with. No one is wishing them away, just as no parent of a born child, however inconvenient its birth, ever wishes it away.
But the non-existence of the unborn seems to be a difficult concept for many to grasp. What-if-I-was-never-born is a non-thought. Consider anyway the hugely wasteful number of fertilised eggs that are swept out of the body, all unknowing, or the one in five confirmed pregnancies that end in miscarriage, let alone the unborn children every fertile woman fails to bear due to contraception. (Or nuns fail to bear through lack of sex.) By bearing one child, a woman denies the right to life of other putative children who might be conceived while she is bearing that one.
No, this vanishes into the realms of absolute nonsense. For a woman to choose not to have a disabled child but to have another one instead is entirely rational. Once a child is born, the whole story changes. Let the commission focus on people who exist, not on making women bear disabled children against their will.
The commission could have taken a far wiser route. They could have demanded equal rights to abortion for all with no stipulation about disability, just abortion on demand for any woman's private reason. Our abortion law is now among the most restrictive in Europe, requiring two doctors' agreement - as if the decision had anything to do with medicine or doctors were any kind of moral arbiters. The British pregnancy advisory service and others are looking for an MP to put up a bill calling for abortion on request up to 14 weeks, and with just one doctor's signature up to 24 weeks.
However, since late abortion is allowed in the case of a disabled foetus, there is no reason why it should not be permitted on all grounds. There are fewer than 100 late abortions a year on grounds of disability. Only the truly desperate, very young and menopausal women who don't recognise their pregnancy until too late would seek distressing late abortions if the law were changed. So if the commission wants "equality", why not go for the absolute right of all women to choose, whenever? But how far removed their theoretical "moral" debate is from the everyday plight of women pregnant against their will.
Ending the medical mystification that surrounds abortion would help stop the mendacious pro-Life propaganda that abortion is dangerous, causes infertility and permanent psychological trauma. Those most influenced by Life's pictures of thumb-sucking embryos are the youngest teenagers who most need abortions if they get pregnant. As a result of Life's false sentimentality, only 53% of pregnant women under 16 choose abortion. Unplanned pregnancy happens to the most organised of women - Cherie Blair for one. The pill is only 99% effective and since 3.5m women take it, at least 35,000 efficient pill-users (and even more inefficient ones) will get pregnant accidentally every year. Free, simple and quick abortion will always be an essential health service for women of all ages and classes. Yet despite overwhelming public support, it is still suffused with shame and guilt: too many teachers still fear to promote it as they would contraception. The disability rights commission has set back the case, for the sake of a mad ideology of its own.