I’ve noticed lately an uptick in the discussion on abortion among my online friends and on the radio; I’m pretty sure it is due to some recent state laws (or proposed laws) related to the topic, but I have been avoiding political topics like the plague recently for various reasons so I don’t know the details. So I am not planning, here, to go into legal details. I don’t know what is best from a pragmatic perspective, balancing the needs and rights of every person in a far-from-ideal world full of broken and sinful people and circumstances.
But a lot of the arguments I have seen remind me of the atrocities commemorated every March 1st on the Disability Day of Mourning. There are parents who believe that their children’s lives will be not worth living because of their disability, who think it would be better if they didn’t live at all then live with that suffering, and quite logically decide to kill them. There are reporters and juries and judges who believe that the burden of care and support placed upon these parents by their disabled victims somehow makes their crime less heinous and more deserving of leniency and compassion. None of these parents wanted a disabled child, after all. Their entire lives were overturned and their expectations and plans were dashed because of these children’s existence. And since the victims weren’t going to have great quality of life anyway, due to their disability, surely we can all identify with their parents and the hard decision they made stemming from their grief and anger and stress (again, all the fault of the victim). On the Disability Day of Mourning, the disabled community remembers these victims, speaking their names, attributing to their memory the individual worth and human value that they were denied in life.
And when I read what my friends have to say in defense of abortion – focusing on the pain and grief of the mother, on the brokenness of the situations that most commonly lead to abortion, on the emotional and physical caregiving demands placed by the fetus on an unwilling parent, on the potential for child abuse and poor quality of life for the unaborted child – it makes me think that if we (as a society) can say these things about the killing of the unborn, it won’t be long before we can say them about the disabled. Because yes, all those points are true and valid and need to be addressed, but they do not invalidate the humanity of the vulnerable and needy and young – of the child who did not ask to be conceived, or to be born with a disability, but who as a result of the brokenness of the world finds herself in need of care and support with no open and loving arms extended to her.
How do we love and support those who unexpectedly find themselves parenting a special needs child with no clue of how to handle things – or who find out they are pregnant and know they have no resources to raise a child? How do we protect children whose parents sink into abusive or neglectful behaviors because they are overwhelmed by the support and care necessitated by their child’s disability or believe their disabled child to be less valuable or deserving of love – or because they never wanted a child and are suddenly pregnant and have no love to give to the child of a rapist or abuser? Whatever the best answer is, I’m fairly sure it doesn’t involve killing those children, anymore than it would involve killing the adults who find themselves in parental positions they are inadequate to cope with. We need to reach out with hands gentled by our own knowledge of the brokenness of the world and of each human heart, and smooth the troubled path before the feet of these parents and their children: sometimes to guide, sometimes to lend a helping hand over obstacles in the way, sometimes to carry, and sometimes to chart a splitting of ways. And at the same time, we need to make sure that the amount of support a person needs – the extent of their dependence on caregivers – does not impact the value we ascribe to their life.
Otherwise, we end up attempting to erase a problem by erasing a person.
little thoughts 