<HTML>Marta: The logic of your argument does not truly account for the social relations which cause women to abort any and all disabled fetus. You act as though women's freedom to choose is void of prejudice, stereotypical notions of impairment, and not the product of a "normalizing" society.  The knee jerk aborting of disabled fetus is aligned with an ideology of "normality."  Nor does your argument take into account the medical profession's complicity in the decisions that women make about fetus with impairments. The medical institution (abortion is a part of) is just as socially oppressive towards disabled persons as any other social institution - employment, housing, transportation, etc.  "Freedom" must come with a materialist consciousness otherwise it is just as oppressive as anything else. </BLOCKQUOTE> I don't think that women are free of prejudice, or exempt from the normalizing discourses of a disciplinary society. Women can and do obtain abortions for reasons that most of us would see as immoral, such as sex selection. But given the various potential agents for deciding when to carry a fetus to full term, I am convinced that woman are the best moral agents, most likely to make the best and most moral decisions. I am also convinced that since pregnancies carry consequences for the freedom of the woman, she should decide whether or not she is prepared to bear those burdens. I do not deny that there is a validity to your claims; my concern is your tendency to make them absolute. For example, we are now in a position, via genetics, to minimize, if not absolutely eliminate, the chance that a child will be born with incredibly debilitating genetic diseases that produce short and painful lives. I see your line of argument leading to objections when a mother has amniocentesis and genetic testing to ensure that she does not care a child that will develop cystic fibrosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, or even sickle cell anemia. I, by contrast, think that given the choice between having a child without the disease and a child with the disease, I would choose the former in a heartbeat. And I see nothing wrong with using genetic selection technology, now available, to ensure that end. I even think that abortions to that end are defensible. Now I certainly agree with you that abortions for the purpose of having a 'perfect' child, without any medical conditions, is a different story, and that to abort a child simply because s/he has "curvature" of the spine is not, in my judgment, a moral choice. But I am prepared to try to draw a line here between moral and immoral choices; I suspect that you do not want to draw any such lines. 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 --</HTML>