Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus doubles down on eugenics, aborting Down Syndrome babies
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus has doubled down on her stance to abort a child prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. Following up to the hate mail send after her op-ed, titled “I would’ve aborted a fetus with Down syndrome. Women need that right,” Marcus says “…the majority view is not proof that their attitude is correct; morality is not determined by popular vote.”
She wrote bluntly in her March 9th piece: “I can say without hesitation that, tragic as it would have felt and ghastly as a second-trimester abortion would have been, I would have terminated [my] pregnancies had the testing come back positive.”
photo Pawel Loj
Can you imagine the horror in the minds of her two daughters, Emma and Julia Rachel, who were blessed to have the right number of chromosomes, because mama would have killed you otherwise.
“That was not the child I wanted,” Marcus had stated.
Now the eugenics supporters addressed the pushback against her argument: “These emails reflect a silenced majority — silenced because, as I discovered, saying that you would terminate a pregnancy for this reason unleashes fury and invective. That these readers reflect the majority view is not proof that their attitude is correct; morality is not determined by popular vote.
“But their voices do illustrate the agonizing complexity of the matter and reinforce my fundamental point: This is a choice that must remain with the individual who will live with the consequences, not with a government imposing its will on her.”
At one point she confesses to the difficulty of the “creepy, eugenic aspects” of such a position, but stops of short of asking why she’s the moral arbiter of abortion practices. If morality is personal, every woman as the right to do what they want, is it ok to abort a baby based on gender? Why is it moral in the womb, but amoral outside of the womb?
Her logic defends infanticide and euthanasia.
She argues it’s the limited cognitive abilities which drive her stance:
“Accepting that essential truth is different from compelling a woman to give birth to a child whose intellectual capacity will be impaired, whose life choices will be limited, whose health may be compromised. Most children with Down syndrome have mild to moderate cognitive impairment, meaning an IQ between 55 and 70 (mild) or between 35 and 55 (moderate). This means limited capacity for independent living and financial security; Down syndrome is life-altering for the entire family.”
So, should we can ask Marcus to apply this logic to members of other minority groups that face unique challenges?
Marcus isn’t alone as CBS published a report praising the efforts in Iceland to eliminate Down Syndrome through abortion. Yes, you read that correctly. In fact, CBS News’s tweeted promotion for the story, which read: “Iceland is on pace to virtually eliminate Down syndrome through abortion.”
In that article, Helga Sol Olafsdottir, counsels women who have a pregnancy with a chromosomal abnormality, explained the perspective in Iceland.
“We don’t look at abortion as a murder. We look at it as a thing that we ended. We ended a possible life that may have had a huge complication… preventing suffering for the child and for the family. And I think that is more right than seeing it as a murder — that’s so black and white. Life isn’t black and white. Life is grey.”
Even if life is grey, ending that life is black and white.
photo Danielle Catrett White
