[Vision2020] Response to Abortion Post

[Melynda Huskey]

Nick,

I think it's important to address a couple of points related to your discussion of people with disabilities.

"A critic might say that this focus on brain power would make those with mental deficiencies non-persons.  Even though the average IQ for microcephalics is 10, they still have a mental life greater than the late term fetus. Down Syndrome people have an average IQ of 50, but their problems are due to brain metabolism not the amount of neo-cortex they have.?  While most of the mentally deficient will always be beginning persons (=children) with a serious moral right to life, they will not be adults with both rights and duties.  Many with Down Syndrome can become adults, hold down jobs, and even marry."

Terms like "mental life" and "mental deficiency" are extremely imprecise, where they most need to be precise, and they conceal a slippery slope that you need to address to make your argument persuasive.  People with cognitive disabilities constitute a large and quite various group.  To lump them together as either "mentally deficient" (an interpretive category) or "Down Syndrome" (a medical diagnosis) is misleading.  Your use of IQ data is also troubling--IQ tests are not particularly helpful for determining intellectual capacity at either the very low or very high end of the scale.  There are other, more nuanced tests for that purpose.  And since IQ tests can't be administered to fetuses, it's impossible to use them as evidence for your claim.  What exactly is "mental life"?  Is there a point at which we can objectively determine that Person X's "mental life" is equivalent to that of a mid-term fetus, and so we can legitimately euthanize him or her?  What do we know about the mental life of fetuses?

I'm also puzzled by your last two sentences, which seem to stray into other territory entirely, the definition of adulthood or personhood, and which I strongly disagree with.  Cognitively disabled adults are not "beginning persons."  They are fully persons.  They are also not permanently children.  They age and experience developmental change across the lifespan, whether or not they achieve such goals as being employed or marrying (goals which are not necessary conditions for adulthood in the non-disabled person).  That their experience of adulthood differs from that experience in non-disabled people is not surprising, but is that really grounds for excluding them from adulthood?

Your argument does seem to imply that cognitive function--or possibly brain physiology--is, by itself, a test of personhood.  I think that line of reasoning lends itself very neatly to eugenic arguments, ending perhaps in Peter Singer's assertion that it is ethically acceptable to euthanize disabled infants for some time following birth, since their lives are objectively worth less than the trouble they entail.

Melynda Huskey