Prenatal Screening: A Productive Ritual (original) (raw)
Related papers
Prenatal Diagnosis, Personal Identity, and Disability
Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 2000
A fascinating criticism of abortion occasioned by prenatal diagnosis of potentially disabling traits is that the complex of test-and-abortion sends a morally disparaging message to people living with disabilities. I have argued that available versions of this "expressivist" argument are inadequate on two grounds. The most fundamental is that, considered as a practice, abortions prompted by prenatal testing are not semantically well-behaved enough to send any particular message; they do not function as signs in a rule-governed symbol system. Further, even granting, for the sake of argument, the expressive power of testing and aborting, it would not be possible, contra the argument's proponents, to distinguish between abortions undertaken because of beliefs about the disabling conditions the fetus might face as a child and abortions undertaken for many other possible reasons-e.g., because of the poverty the fetus would face or the increase in family size that the birth of a new child would occasion. Here, I respond to criticisms of those arguments, and propose and defend another: the expressivist argument cannot, in general, distinguish successfully between abortion and therapy as modalities for responding to disabilities.
PRENATAL TESTING AND DISABILITY RIGHTS: CHALLENGING "GENETIC GENOCIDE"
Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 2018
This paper examines the implications of the disability rights critique of prenatal testing on the development of genetic policy and abortion rights. It traces the reappearance of the disabled body in public deliberations over reproductive and genetic politics that use disability to frame arguments about which bodies are worthy of protection, how and why we limit reproductive choices, and what reasons women may use to terminate their pregnancies. The disability critique of prenatal testing and selective abortion finds itself in productive tension with reproductive rights politics, which increasingly features disability in both pro-life and pro-choice messages. The uneasy alliance between disability and pro-life interests has profound implications for both disability legal scholarship and the sociolegal inquiry into the role of rights articulation-and rejection-by social movements.
2011
This paper explores the role of identity in relation to the ethics of prenatal testing for conditions that cause intellectual disabilities. Specifically, it considers the question of identity and the moral status of the fetus. It argues that both the arguments in favour and opposed to prenatal testing mistakenly presuppose that there is no moral status attached to the fetus. That status is grounded in an identity-constituting characteristic, such as 'intellectual disability', which is brought about by the purpose of genetic testing, and the meaning of which is culturally constructed. This paper examines the implications this has for the debate around both prenatal testing and termination in general and considers the nature of the ethical politics which follows from this position with regard to prenatal testing related to intellectual disability.
Bioethics, Disability and Selective Reproductive Technology: Taking Intersectionality Seriously
Wasserman, D. & Cureton, A. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Disability. Oxford: Oxford University Press (in press)
This chapter explores disability-based criticism against what is here called selective reproductive technology (SRT), such as prenatal screening programmes, in light of recent calls for disability theory, as well as political activism based on that, to accommodate for an intersectional turn across all types of critical social identity studies (class, disability, gender, lgbt, queer, race, etc.). Applying intersectionality to the disability SRT critique generates complex and provoking implications; not invalidating it, but radically transforming its shape and direction. Most notably, it inserts a wedge between the identity-based experience that SRT unjustly discriminates and oppresses disabled people, and the identity political call for SRT programmes to be shut down or, at least, not publicly supported. Intersectionality steers the justification towards politically addressing structural factors explaining injustice independently of identity-based experience, and SRT programmes may have to be allowed for such action to be sustainable also from a disability identity standpoint.
'Diseases', 'defects', 'abnormalities' and 'conditions': Discursive tensions in prenatal screening
Reframing Reproduction, 2014
In this chapter we examine the way in which choice is discursively constructed in the context of prenatal screening, contending that the terms used to describe prenatal screening and disability may have the effect of enabling certain courses of action and discouraging others, even when the test is offered under the guise of increasing individual choice. We begin by introducing our approach to discourse analysis, and outlining the context in which informed choices for prenatal screening take place in Canada. Using data from three sources collected for a related study (Vanstone, 2012), we identify two different discourses related to informed choices about prenatal screening and explore the tensions between them. After comparing the ways that these discourses operate together and in conflict with each other, we consider the understandings that these particular discourses may infer about disability, pregnancy, and motherhood. Finally, we reflect on the potential implications of dominant discourses about informed choices about prenatal screening. In this endeavour, we hope to highlight the influence of social context on choices about prenatal screening emphasizing the importance of considering the impact of social context on reproductive choices when thinking sociologically about reproduction .
Identity, difference and the ethical politics of prenatal testing
Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, 2003
This paper explores the role of identity in relation to the ethics of prenatal testing for conditions that cause intellectual disabilities. Specifically, it considers the question of identity and the moral status of the fetus. It argues that both the arguments in favour and opposed to prenatal testing mistakenly presuppose that there is no moral status attached to the fetus. That status is grounded in an identity-constituting characteristic, such as ‘intellectual disability’, which is brought about by the purpose of genetic testing, and the meaning of which is culturally constructed. This paper examines the implications this has for the debate around both prenatal testing and termination in general and considers the nature of the ethical politics which follows from this position with regard to prenatal testing related to intellectual disability.
Sociology of Health & Illness, 2007
This paper draws on the narratives of parents of disabled babies in order to conceptualise notions of enabling care. This analysis emerges from the Sheffield site of an ESRC research project Parents, Professionals and Disabled Babies: Identifying Enabling Care, which brings together the Universities of Sheffield and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The linear heroic narrative is a dominant theme within Western culture. It is competitive and individualistic and tends to be future-orientated in that actions conducted in the present are evaluated according to later outcomes. This linear narrative places much store on modernist interventions such as medicine, and tends to uphold professional boundaries and hierarchies. In the lifeworlds of parents, usually mothers, of disabled babies, this narrative can reinforce disempowering interpretations of disability and impairment. On the basis of 25 in-depth interviews, accompanying stories and ethnographic data, this paper suggests that parents are developing counter-narratives which, at times, resist linear life models and free parents to enjoy their children as they are. If life is perceived as an open book rather than as a concluding chapter, parents are able to develop stories that are neither linear nor heroic but present and becoming.
The ideology of motherhood precludes disabled people in various ways: sometimes outlawing it completely, in the case of enforced or coerced sterilisation; sometimes condemning it through the sanctioned removal of children and/or adoption; and at other times complicating it severely through lack of access to accessible goods and services that all mothers require to function in their day-today lives-such as pushchairs/prams, baby-changing equipment and baby-wearing apparatus. Ableism, "compulsory able-bodiedness" (Campbell, 2009; McRuer, 2013), will be used as an interrogative tool to aid in the 'outing' of the 'able': to tease out the values and principles undergirding this exclusionary perception of motherhood. As such I will be drawing on autoethnographic material, in conjunction with a Studies in Ableism (SiA; Campbell, 2009) approach to analyse the bypassing of disabled mothers and to suggest tentative ways forward. In the UK 1.7 million parents identify as disabled (Morris & Wates, 2006) and perhaps many more would do so if there were no fear of censure (see,