Disability and abortion

[Esquilax]

So I as pro-choice person I always hit this little snag when the reasons for abortion are rolled out, and all of them are good except this one. My biggest red flag are the words "quality of life". And it always makes me really uncomfortable as a pro-choice person that people who quite often have never encountered a person with a disability or talked to one make judgments about the kind of lives we lead. Especially when your pregnancy is planned.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think the logic is quite as binding as you're making it. Pro-choice peeps are, of course, advocating offering women the choice of whether or not to abort, not arguing that every disabled fetus be aborted; I think it's uncontroversial that the only person who gets to make the judgment on the quality of life of a potential infant is the mother. I'm not necessarily sure it's a value judgment about disabled people as people; "your quality of life could be better," is not the same statement as "your quality of life is insufficient."

For the record though, this is coming from a guy who volunteered to work with disabled kids in a special needs class in his youth, and is married to a disabled person. Quality of life is a scale, not a binary proposition, and the arbiter of it should always be the person themselves in cases where they're competent to do so.