“Abortion rights supporters … have had to grapple with the reality that the right to choose may well be used selectively to abort fetuses deemed genetically undesirable,” reports The New York Times for the second time in the last two weeks. “And many are finding that, while they support a woman’s right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don’t want to have a particular baby.”
Public opinon seems to be on the side of those who chose to abort genetically disabled babies. 70 percent of Americans agree with such a choice. Where should America draw the line between a legitmate reason for aborting a baby and an illegitimate one?
Kirsten Moore, president of the pro-choice Reproductive Health Technologies Project, said that when members of her staff recently discussed whether to recommend that any prenatal tests be banned, they found it impossible to draw a line – even at sex selection, which almost all found morally repugnant. “We all had our own zones of discomfort but still couldn’t quite bring ourselves to say, ?Here’s the line, firm and clear’ because that is the core of the pro-choice philosophy,” she said. “You can never make that decision for someone else.”
Unless you say that that decision to is not theirs to make.
