"Choosing Disability"

In Laura Hershey’s piece “Choosing Disability,” she talks about the problems with abortion of “fetal deformity” or a “defective fetus”.  Hershey starts off her piece with a being at an antiabortion protest in honor of Roe v. Wade.  She said, “I was confronted by an angry nun whose “Abortion Is Murder” sign hung tiredly at her side.  She stopped in front of me and aimed a pugnacious finger.  “You see?” she announced.  “God even let you be born!”.  I think this is a great way to sum up this article because I’m sure more than just one person thinks this way.  Some think that if a woman knows that her baby is going to be disabled that she should get an abortion.  “In a 1992 Time/CNN survey, for example, 70 percent of respondents favored abortion if a fetus was likely to be born deformed”.  70 percent is a large amount of people that think it is okay to not have a child if they are going to be deformed.  Deformed or not, a person is still a person and should have the same chance as everyone. 

            Personally, I think that a woman should have their own choice to decide what they want to do with their body.  I agree with Julie Reiskin, a social worker who is active in disability rights and abortion rights, when she states “It should be because women have the right to do what we want with our bodies, period”.  Abortion should not be legal to use because of a fetal disability.  Don’t get me wrong, raising a child with disabilities is a very hard task, but that is the risk women know when getting pregnant, so that should be no reason to get an abortion.  You adapt with these disabilities and make the child stronger from these hardships.  I also agree with Hershey’s statement of “Abortion based on disability results from, and in turn strengthens, certain beliefs: children with disabilities (and by implication adults with disabilities) are a burden to family and society; life with a disability is scarcely worth living; preventing the birth is an act of kindness; women who bear disabled children have failed”.  I feel that by doing this makes people think that it’s okay to not birth a child because a disability is too hard.  I also think that if a disabled person hears this they feel even worse about themselves and think they are worthless.  No person should feel that way about their own self.  If the people that say these things about people with disabilities were ever in their shoes they would realize how hard it is without other people’s negative comments.

            Just like almost everything else we’ve talked about in class has had influence from the media, abortion has the same too.  People make these choices with social values in mind, such as how are people going to look at them or their child, or how their child will move around, or even if they will have the same opportunities as the rest of the world does.