Today is Aidan’s fourteenth birthday.  At one level, this should be unremarkable: just another adolescent boy passing another year marker, working his way awkwardly to adulthood.  But, of course, Aidan is anything but typical.  On each of his birthdays, Maureen, my wife, and I hug or high-five.  We don’t have to say anything.  The reference is clear: we, Aidan and us, have tacked on another year, defying for a bit longer, the pessimistic prediction of the doctors who said he would die young.  Fourteen is not old but it is longer than their gloomy assessments when he was an infant.  While there have been difficult times, there has been joy and happiness in Aidan’s life, and in ours because of him.   Happy birthday.

     So, it is quite appropriate that Patricia E. Bauer should write an op-ed in the Washington Post today on the difficult subject of abortion and disability.  Her daughter, Margaret, has Down Syndrome and has recently graduated from high school and lives a happy and full life. How is it, Bauer asks, that the tacit social expectation is that people with disabilities are somehow less than fully human?  Why does society so readily condone the unquestioning abortion of fetuses with Down Syndrome?  The answer is not so easy when she reflects upon her daughter’s life:

 Margaret is a person and a member of our family. She has my husband’s
eyes, my hair and my mother-in-law’s sense of humor. We love and admire
her because of who she is — feisty and zesty and full of life — not
in spite of it. She enriches our lives. If we might not have chosen to
welcome her into our family, given the choice, then that is a statement
more about our ignorance than about her inherent worth.

    Ignorance is the key here.  Had Aidan not come into our lives, I would have a very different view of disability.  I would have been ignorant, or more ignorant.  I would have likely embraced the shallow sympathy of the mainstream belief that disability is, by definition, tragedy; instead of reflecting back on my own limitations and seeing a certain humanity in all persons, disabled or not. 

     The question, then, is: how do we expand society’s vision and understanding of disability, how do we undermine the tragedy narrative and replace it with a common humanity narrative that encourages a wider social acceptance of and (this is crucial) support for disabled people?  It is not so much a problem of absolutely forbidding abortion of disabled fetuses, as it is creating a society in which disability is so warmly accepted and sustained that parents would see any child, disabled or not, as a loving, and loved, member of the family.

     Not all parents will have the capacity – due both to personal characteristics as well as socio-economic circumstance – to support a child with a disability.  But more parents do have such capacities than they might, at first, realize.  I suspect that decisions to abort disabled fetuses are often matters of image and expectation (do we want to be, and be known as, the "parents of the disabled kid"?), rather than genuine personal or socio-economic limitation.  But we cannot know that surely in every case; so, abortion might be acceptable in some instances. 

    Thus, instead of using the law to regulate behavior (here is a tie to Chinese philosophy: both Confucius and the Taoists frown on using the law as the principle means of social regulation.  For Confucius, enacting morality, and supporting the daily performance of morality, is  more important than legislating morality), we should think of ways to allow people, and especially prospective parents, to see the beauty of children with disabilities.  And the first way to do that is to put more resources and attention into supporting families with disabled children.

    If securing needed therapies and programs for disabled children in schools was less of a struggle and more of a welcoming and constructive process, then some of the stigma of disability might disappear.  If there were more healthy and happy group-living accommodations for adults with disabilities, adults whose parents have passed away, then new parents with disable children would worry less about what the future might hold.  If there were as much emphasis in our culture on common humanity as there was on individual productivity (I am, you will remember, against productivity), then there would be less questioning the value or worth of disabled people.

     None of this is easy.  There are powerful counter-forces – most conspicuously, the centrality of the "rugged individual" myth of American life and the social distortions of market-based rewards for individual "talent"- but it is possible to change the story of disability from unproductive tragedy to fulfilling happiness.  Bauer’s piece helps.