selective abortion: eugenics
it sounds like hypocrisy, but with selective abortion the woman is not defining what's acceptable in her body, she's deciding what kind of people are desirable to bring into the world. it's a different motive, and therefore different ethics
@dangerdyke This still sounds somewhat confused to me, so my attempt:
leaving the abortion decision to the pregnant person: cool, good
a specific abortion: might depend on the situation
Although I also think that deciding to bring a person into the world means you should influence the person at least in some ways (take your prenatal vitamins people!), so maybe I actually disagree?
@dangerdyke Well, no, you just made a general post about morality though, which kind of implied much more than that.
And I also think that I wouldn't prevent a person from having an abortion if they wanted it purely for the reason of not wanting to have an autistic child, even if I thought what they were doing wasn't right. Although I'm not sure you disagree on that.
@dangerdyke I weakly disagree with the former and strongly with the latter.
The majority of people ignorant about the topic will react negatively to autism in their children, but I'm very unconvinced they would directly want autistic people not to exist (although I see how the former semi-implies the latter as a practical consequence).
But I think that there are other ways than these two, in particular making people understand the neurotypical/neurodivergent distinction better. And I know this is harder and slower than outlawing one of the things you suggest, but this outlawing creates quite a lot of collateral damage I'm really worried about. :/ (obvious for abortion I hope, for prenatal testing it has many more applications than just "helping to decide on an abortion") Not to mention that growing up neurodivergent in a family that isn't supportive also can have quite severe disadvantages.
Sorta related – you might enjoy "Cocoon" by Greg Egan.
@timorl if people didn’t want autistic people to exist, they wouldn’t subject their autistic kids to 40+ hours a week of ABA torture “therapy”
I am not exaggerating. there are places in the US where they still literally electrocute autistic children into being “normal.” ABA is also the only “treatment” for autistic people covered by insurance, so many parents, desperate for a nonexistent cure for their child not being normal, just let it happen. if this is already the norm, i don’t see why just aborting every autistic child would be less attractive to neurotypical parents.
yes understanding is a good thing. but the reality is a lot more money is going into developing these prenatal tests so they can do eugenics on autistics, then is going into education on how to accommodate us.
@dangerdyke I don't know what ABA is, and judging by your vague description I probably don't want to know... Eh, I definitely understand your anger, society is clearly very unjust in this respect. :(
At the same time I think the reasons you give make going the education route even more tempting – if it's underfunded then any effort put into this has bigger effect than trying to fight against money being poured into lobbying by the creators of "cures".
But these are political practicalities, my main moral argument is still that the collateral damage of forbidding prenatal testing is too great, so we shouldn't be going for that even if it was politically easier.
