way. Doctors and counsellors have a duty to explain the side effects of abortion and stress that it is not the only option. In fact, a medical training should include a disability awareness course, then doctors would not infect their patients with such paranoia on discovering a disabled baby in the womb. If doctors talked positively and explained that spina bifida, muscular dystrophy etc. are not the end of the world and that disabilities actually do not, in themselves, preclude a good quality of life, I'm sure few would feel the 'need' to abort. It is the doctor's job to allay human fear, not the reverse, and to point people in the way of organisations or groups which offer post-natal support. In any case, all too often doctors make predictions which are wildly inaccurate. Speaking from personal experience, according to medical opinion I should have been in a wheelchair 8 years earlier than predicted, and dead 10 years ago. Well I can tell you I'm alive and kicking and intend to be around for a long while yet! Nor am I an exception - I know of many people with disabilities who as babies were labelled 'ineducable', 'vegetable' etc. and had very gloomy futures forecast but who are now living independently, some married, some with university degrees, some with fulfilling careers, and I'm including mentally disabled people. The medical profession is respected and regarded as an authority on every aspect of giving birth and we tend to take as gospel what doctors say, so when the medical opinion is, 'It's better for society if disabled babies are not born', this attitude is received as if it were a diagnosis. What sort of society do we live in where lives are treated like commercial commodities and what hope is there for those with a disability to gain greater understanding in a society where even doctors question our existence in the first place? I realise that only a small percentage of babies are aborted on grounds of disability but people with disabilities feel this is the thin end of the wedge. Eugenicists who wish to create a perfect race have to face the reality that this world is not only for the perfect, the planned and the privileged. Parents who want to wait for a 'perfect' child and/or a perfect environment for the child's upbringing may as well not give birth at all. It is not possible to eradicate suffering through abortion. Anyway, why this myth that disabled people suffer 24 hours a day and nondisabled people don't suffer at all? How many suicide cases are people with disabilities? A letter from Teresa Connor published in the June 1988 edition of Disability Now gave the ideal answers to a French eugenic practitioner from her Scottish point of view:
What about the really crippling diseases of our modern times, vices such as selfishness, greed and lust? The list could be endless. Being so preoccupied with this job, she ... wouldn't have time to worry about the trivialities of our disabilities; they would be a drop in the ocean in comparison. We would have time to enjoy the good life then! This same message I would pass on to the pro-abortionists in our society. They are every bit as icy.