I see from reading Marty Klein’s excellent blog that Ohio, in its race to the bottom for reproductive rights, seems prepared to ban any abortion requested because Down’s Syndrome was detected in the fetus.
WTF?
Aside from the probable unconstitutionality of cherry-picking a woman’s reasons to end a pregnancy, what is the heroic point of this? Are they that anxious to have more mental defectives in the population? Advocates are saying things like ““with nine out of 10 babies with Down syndrome being aborted, extinction is what we are really talking about,” or “…we need this bill so that they can be born, and not culled.” These are the utterances of women who actually have given birth to progeny with this defect, and I can only think that they resent the idea that someone else might be spared what they have let themselves in for.
Hello. People. Infants with birth defects are not a separate species. Extinction is an irrelevant concept. We are not talking about a legacy culture disappearing from the planet. We’re talking about women who don’t want to have retarded offspring. A decision which all of us should support.
Political correctness has gone bananas, and now it is coming back to bite women (of course, women) right in the ass.
Sixteen Tons 
LOL now you’ve done it! I think it’s similar to “deaf culture” ~ you may have read about deaf activists who don’t want to encourage scientific developments that could result in a cure for some/all deafness. That would destroy their activism. Likewise, there is (I image) an entire culture built around Down’s, with all sorts of support groups and services. There is likely a financial motivation in continuing this, as well as an emotional one. It just doesn’t make ANY FUCKING SENSE that we would encourage more handicapped babies to be born. Obviously if they’re already here, we should help them, but that’s an entirely different thing. The anti-abortionists in general strike me as nuts. If the premise is to care about babies, then care about the ones already born!
To say nothing of the fact that we are drowning in people, and some of these anti-abortion zealots seem determined to set up a situation where people will just keep on breeding until we start falling off the planet. What hacks me off beyond the power of speech is that they co-opt the idea of “fairness” and twist it to mean “let’s allow more pointless suffering.”
*imagine
*sigh* People. Are. So. Fucking. Stupid.
Yes. Exactly. I mean in a general sense, yes, but specifically when it comes to this kind of dumbassery, the stupid are driving the car and why are they driving it? Because when they’re in the same room with a retardate, even the most intellectually insecure, vapid, mentally lazy blivet can feel like a Superior Being. And given the prevalence of human narcissism, there’s a lot of that kind of person out there. The same people who made you and me miserable for using Big Words (because we made them feel self-conscious about their ignorance) just luhhhhv the Special Olympics and Special Ed and bills to protect the freedom of the retarded to have children (yes those exist, and my own local delegate got in bed with a nationwide known Republican pronatalist asshole colleague to pay “reparations” to the retarded who had been sterilized in the state in past decades — as if anyone should be *born* to a parent with equivalent IQ and heart rate). Meanwhile, let’s all be suspicious of the people who have been using their brains for years to understand climate and evolution and the universe and history; that hurts our heads. Let’s pat the little retards and make sure there’s a steady supply.
Or at least that’s my cynical old lady’s take, informed by three years working in a university department where they taught people to teach Special Ed.
Oh my. I’m afraid to say what I want to, as my comments might be followed by nasty locals. But I will say that that test of which you speak isn’t even done here – why bother, you can’t get an abortion anyway. There is a reason Ireland cleaned up at the special Olympics and I’m pretty sure I just said why.
*grim laugh*
And yes, you know what? It looks as if a couple of nasty locals did pop onto this comment thread. But I moderate, and I don’t pass comments that run right to the “Nazi” argument that is the proverbial end point of Internet contention, nor consist merely of abusive name calling, and between them they managed both. It’s the response I always get when I try to make a point about this issue, which makes me think that people have no good counter-argument and/or have some sort of irrational investment.