Disability Rights – Babies, Women, Numbers

Posted on August 21, 2024 By Rachel MacNair

by Rachel MacNair

This was originally written for a referendum to allow late-term abortions on our project website Peace and Life Referendums. The measure never made the ballot, but we don’t let write-ups go to waste, so it became one of several topic pages.

Fetuses with Disabilities

One of the most common reasons given for making late-term abortions available is that the unborn child is diagnosed with some form of disability. (Around the world, that “disability” can often mean being female; this is much less common in the U.S., but not unheard of).

Studies show a troubling impact of disability-selective abortions. In the United States, after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) passed in 1990, this anti-discrimination and pro-accommodation legislation should have had a positive effect on how people with disabilities were seen. For those well beyond infancy, it did. However, one study noted a dramatic decrease in the birth rate for Down Syndrome babies after its passage. With no reason to believe they were conceived at different rates before and after passage of ADA, and prenatal screening abilities being the same, authors attributed the decrease to demeaning and negative portrayals in the media.

Another study showed how this worked, looking at newspapers from 1998-2006: disability was presented negatively. It was because of positive portrayals of prenatal testing. The reports were commonly positive about terminating the pregnancy when there was a disability diagnosis. Therefore, the ready availability of abortion and its positive portrayal sabotages the cause of disability rights.

Pregnant Women with Disabilities

Women with disabilities are already subjected to many forms of discrimination. Telling them they can’t handle a life event such as pregnancy can involve having disdain for them. It’s also discriminatory. Abortion availability can be used as an excuse to avoid providing pregnant women with disabilities the extra services they need and deserve. Stigma associated with having disabilities is increased when it’s used as a reason to avoid reproducing.

Numbers

A figure of 13,000 yearly abortions over 20 weeks in the U.S. is based on applying the CDC report of late-terms being 1.3% of abortions to the Guttmacher Institute’s report of around a million abortions. The Guttmacher Institute itself, however, has reported 15,000. Official figures have been as low as around 10,000.

These figures are comparable to gun-related homicides in the entire United States. Few people think such homicides are “rare.”