decide whether or not to take the risk of having more children. But to conceive children on a sale-or-return basis is wholly wrong.' Alison Davis, who runs the handicapped division of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, and who has spina-bifida, says of the tests: 'They are not prevention. It could not have resulted in me being born without spina-bifida. It would have resulted in me being washed down the laboratory sink at an early age.' The feminist writer, the late Ellen Wilkie, put the arguments in her own characteristic way in A Pocketful of Dynamite14:
To abort someone on the grounds of disability is the first step on a very slippery slope. It opens the door to eugenic practices and there are many in our society who are eugenicists quite unashamedly. If it is disabled babies today it will be babies with AIDS tomorrow. This is not ludicrous scaremongering ... Even now it is considered anti-social for a mother to go ahead and have a disabled baby when she knows it is disabled. Such a baby is regarded as a drain on society's resources but many disabled people contribute far more to society than the average able-bodied football hooligan.
Ellen knew. She had muscular dystrophy. In her poem 'Therapeutic Termination'15 she reminds us that ultimately we will all be held to account for the massive destruction of created life:
Though voiceless you will hear us though powerless we will triumph
outside time in another place we join the ranks for confrontation face to face