I am sure that you have gathered I would draw the line at a very different place. I don't know that there is any definitive argument to decide where the line should be drawn. It strikes me as being analogous to age of consent laws: very few people would deny the need for some sort of law to protect the young from sexual predators, but there is no way to establish exactly what would be the best point, ensuring that the law does not impinge upon young people who are fully capable of consenting to sexual relations with each other. And the law is such a blunt measure, with a single standard, when we know that there are vast differences in the psycho-sexual development of young people.
My problem is that your line is so close to one extreme that it constitutes virtually no line at all. Your last comment seems to confirm that, in a reductio ad absurdum: if we screen for any genetic disease, even the most debilitating, then we will end up screening for a propensity to get prostate cancer. [BTW, it is my understanding that all men get prostate cancer; some of us just die from other causes before we get it, and some of us have a form of prostate cancer which is so slow that we just die of another disease first.] This is a suggestion that a line can not be really drawn.
A real life example: my sister had a still birth, at 5+ months, of a pair of girl twins. It turns out that they shared an ambiotic sac, rather than having separate ambiotic sacs which is the normal physiological development for twin [or any multiple birth] fetuses. The doctors, in what I consider medical malpractice, did not pick up this fact, and so never told my sister that a miscarriage/still birth was almost a certainty, and that the even with a live birth, the physical state of the children would be such that painful death at an early age was the prognosis. Without this knowledge, my sister and her partner went about doing what every expectant parent would do, collecting clothes for twins, etc. At 5 months, she began to collect huge amounts of fluid in her legs, went into the hospital, where they attempted to delay labor until her rising blood pressure threatened her own life, and then had a very traumatic still birth. With the appropriate knowledge, she and her partner could have been spared some of the worst of that experience, by having an abortion; and if she chose not to have an abortion, she would have gone into the experience knowing full well what to expect. It just seems to me that such experiences don't figure in the lines you draw.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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