The Washington Post ran two recent columns arguing that we are prejudging babies born with Down's Syndrome. First, Marc Thiessen and then George Will. I can see how that's possible. I'm old enough to remember when we called them "Mongoloid idiots." Although they didn't say it, Thiessen's and Will's argument comes down to saying that although we adopted the more politically correct term, we had not overcome a lot of the prejudices associated with it. It's a question we really should ask ourselves.
At the same time, Thiessen and Will use this as an argument against permitting (or in the case of some European countries, requiring) abortions for gross fetal deformities. Will goes so far as to say it amounts to genocide as if to conjure up images of an SS grabbing babies with Down's Syndrome and hauling them off to concentration camps. Will is using the plures interrogationes fallacy, assuming one question is answered in order to pass judgment on a subsequent question, in this case to cast supporters of GFD abortions in a bad light.
The real reason we permit abortions for gross fetal deformities is that most voters--even among those who would clamp down on "abortion on demand"--are not so certain that personhood begins at conception that they would force woman to bear children with diagnosed GFDs. Thiessen's and Will’s attempt to remove Down's Syndrome fetuses from the GFD class would not alter this paradigm. If the Zika virus had reached the US two years ago and the diagnosis of microcephaly had boosted demand for late Thiessen and Will would not have gotten vary far asserting that we were prejudging the microcephalic babies.
The abortion issue remains alive because few people are really comfortable stating the extreme logic of their side. On the pro-choice side, maybe one in a million are prepared to say that if the fetus isn't an individual, it is a glorified organ of the mother. Elections have been lost because antiabortionists tried to weasel their way around the conclusion that if abortion is murder, then terminating a rape-induced pregnancy is the execution without trial of the ultimate underage defendant.
The difference is that we the pro-choicers have a philosophy of government that would allow us to legislate in the face of this uncertainty. The Declaration of Independence speaks of "Governments...deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." On the abortion issue, we seek to govern women with unwanted or even dangerous pregnancies. We can handle the lack of consensus over the question, "If the fetus isn't a person, what is it?"
The antiabortionists have not made a similar justification for governing women when they can't answer the tough questions their side must face. Instead, they retreat behind an argument about "abortion on demand," which would let people who would never force a rape survivor to carry her assailant's child to pass judgment on women who seriously can't afford another baby in an already too large family. That judgment has nothing to do with the question of fetal personhood but is a secondary issue which has nothing to do with their "pro-life" rhetoric. By this standard, Thiessen’s and Will’s columns only try to remove Down’s Syndrome from the list of GFDs and treat them as abortions on demand. Even if they succeed with their short term goal, they won’t accomplish anything about the issue of gross fetal deformity.
The abortion issue has gone on too long already. There are many voters out there who would vote for liberal politicians if the issue had been settled one way or the other, but are caught up in the pro-life rhetoric. Indeed, it's possible that the Antiabortion Establishment does not want the issue settled for that very reason. It's far more likely that they're too complacent in thinking "it's obvious to us" is a way to run a democratic nation. Thiessen and Will don't seem particularly interested in bringing the debate to a conclusion, perhaps because they don't want to admit that their case isn't as obvious as it seems to them. Certainly, using the term "genocide" is not an attempt to persuade but to insult.