How widespread are bans against women aborting on the basis of genetic or congenital disability? Six states—Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have prohibited abortion on the grounds of a genetic diagnosis of disability, although others like Florida have attempted to implement such bans. Bans are only one way of preventing these kinds of abortions. In states like Arizona, Minnesota, and Oklahoma, women who seek an abortion because their baby will die within hours or days of birth are required to be notified of the availability of perinatal hospice, which may nudge women to deliver a baby with a lethal abnormality. Other states require women to be counseled on the medical condition or disability of their fetus. And in a few states, doctors are prevented from mentioning abortion as an option when women are informed their fetus is likely to have a severe disability. These laws will be difficult to enforce because, for instance, they require abortion providers to ask women why they wish to terminate their pregnancies or impose on otherwise private conversations. But as one conservative activist said, “Even if it’s hard to enforce, it’s worth being passed. It’s important for a state to show they are not supporting eugenics.”

{snip}

Although the majority of abortions are chosen due to the financial, social, and other burdens of an unplanned pregnancy, eugenic abortions are not uncommon. Around two to three percent of pregnancies in industrialized countries like the US are affected by a birth defect or congenital abnormality. Of these, a significant number result in abortion. For example, when parents are carriers for cystic fibrosis, they terminate pregnancies screened positive for this disease 95 percent of the time. In the developed world, fetuses diagnosed with spina bifida are terminated 63 percent of the time, and 83 percent of fetuses diagnosed with anencephaly are aborted. In the case of Down syndrome, the US has one of the lowest rates of termination at 67 percent. But in other developed countries, the rate is 90 percent or higher. Even in the case of unplanned pregnancies, usually terminated without prenatal screening, five percent of women chose abortion citing concerns about the health of the fetus. According to one woman who sought an abortion, “The medication I’m on for bipolar disorder is known to cause birth defects and we decided it’s akin to child abuse if you know you’re bringing your child into the world with a higher risk for things.”

To add to the confusion about the term, many on the Left have embraced the idea that some forms of discrimination against black people and women is eugenic because some of the eugenics interventions of the 20th century targeted black women for sterilization. This is another domain in which the label of eugenics is being incoherently applied. For example, Project Prevention is an organization that pays women who are addicted to drugs and alcohol $300, plus medical fees and follow up visits, to go on long-term birth control. These women can choose whether to get an IUD, a hormonal implant, or surgical sterilization. One of the main reasons critics have called Project Prevention eugenic is that 20 percent of Project Prevention clients are black. But black women choose abortion even more disproportionately. More than a third of all abortions are among black women. {snip}

{snip}

Although old eugenics is thought to be wildly unpopular (but may not be), the evidence of the popularity of contemporary eugenics is evident from how readily the public have taken it up. Many of eugenics’s staunchest opponents on the Left not only don’t appreciate the extent to which abortion is eugenic, they also don’t realize the extent to which the standard of prenatal care in the developed world is transparently eugenic in its aims. Routine prenatal care in the United States—ultrasounds checking for normal anatomy, recommended genetic screening for women with a family history of specific heritable disorders and women over 35 and so on—are, to a great extent, intended to demonstrate that the unborn child is free from abnormality, malformation, or disability.

{snip}

Many of the arguments against eugenics rest on the claim that exceptions are a slippery slope—that classifying some personal attributes and disorders as desirable or undesirable, respectively, will inevitably lead to the mistreatment of disabled people or genocide. But this hasn’t been the case in countries like Denmark and Israel, where the state pays for prenatal testing, abortions in the case of fetal abnormality, and generous benefits for their disabled citizens. And if eugenics truly is a slippery slope, then the Left should join the Right in enforcing bans on abortion in the case of fetal disability and abnormality.

{snip}