In an op ed intended by the Globe and Mail to be a sympathy piece, a Toronto woman, who identified herself as C. Smyth, told the story of her intention to abort her 19-week-old daughter because the child was diagnosed by a geneticist as having a chromosomal disorder. The child, said Smyth, did not meet her and her husband’s standards or fulfill their dreams of having a child athelete.
She says their 19-week-old “miracle” is “tragically flawed:” the child, she is told will have a “significantly lower functioning than other children,” and the decision to abort was difficult. She cried when told the child was a girl.
40-year-old Smyth writes that she and her 45-year-old lawyer husband do not “feel capable of raising a severely disabled child. It would be different if we didn't have a choice, but we do.”
She describes herself and her husband as financially secure yuppies, professional, with university degrees, who own their own mortgage-free house, and who are fit, healthy and looking 10 years younger than their age.
Smyth writes, “Isn't it more cruel to bring a child burdened with so many disadvantages into the world?”
People with Down’s syndrome and other developmental disabilities and their families are becoming increasingly alarmed at the growing popularity of the eugenics philosophy typified by the Globe piece. Disabled rights groups have said that a societal attitude has grown that people with Down’s syndrome or other disabilities are better off dead.
Smyth bluntly admits that before she had undergone the IVF treatment that conceived her child, she and her husband had already ruled out the question of Down’s syndrome. “We had already decided if it was a Down syndrome baby (one in 30 chance for a mother over 40) we wouldn't continue.”
She assumes that everyone agrees that Down’s syndrome is so horrible that even her devoutly Christian mother would agree. “I thought even my church-going mother (who goes door-to-door collecting money for those who are anti-abortion, and their pro-life campaign) could forgive that.”
She describes the actual killing of her daughter equally bluntly. “On the third day, when the cervix has dilated, the doctor clears out the uterus: the evacuation.”
Letters to the editor have appeared in the Globe decrying the slide towards a new eugenics. Jeremy Jay wrote from Victoria saying that the piece illustrates a shift in the attitudes towards abortion from a debate over the right to life to deciding which children are fit enough to deserve life.
Michael G. Ceci, said “her account gives no consolation to women struggling with the knowledge that their yet unborn child is developmentally disabled.” He pointed out that having this chromosomal disorder is not necessarily a life sentence for the mother, nor should it result in a death sentence for the child.
The piece appeared in the Globe and Mail at the time that the powerful Silent No More Campaign opened in Toronto, where women share their regret at having had an abortion. It also coincides with a Parliamentary effort by Liberal Party MP Paul Steckle to criminalize abortion after 20 weeks gestation.
It is also significant that the Globe produced this anonymous piece at the same time Health Canada is developing regulations under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act to define which genetic disorders are allowed to be screened in IVF embryos. Health Canada is calling for public input on the regulations.
The Catholic Organization for Life and Family made a presentation to Health Canada pointing out the essential moral flaw of a genetic screening of embryos in IVF labs.
COLF wrote that preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) is always a threat to the dignity of human life. “PGD inherently disrespects the dignity and worth of human life, since it is performed in order to select the most genetically perfect embryos while discarding those that are deemed undesirable.”
“Parents, doctors, and society become the evaluators of the future worth and quality of the lives of existing embryos, and the arbitrators of life or death for these embryonic human beings.”
(This article courtesy of LifeSiteNews.com.)
