The Incompleteness of "Her body, her choice."

When privacy intersects societal value-judgments

A bedrock of the pro-choice movement is that abortion is about a woman’s bodily autonomy. Often, that is not the story at all.

When my wife was pregnant in 2009, she had an abnormal result on her routine quad screen. It was likely that our son would have Down Syndrome. In no time, a conscientious obstetrician left a voicemail on our home phone making sure my wife knew that she had options. We were strongly encouraged to meet with a genetic counselor. My wife and I have 4 advanced degrees in medicine and the biological sciences between us, so this wasn’t necessary. Still, we played along. The message was clear, “You should know you have options.” 

These efforts weren’t about my wife’s body. They were about our unborn son’s. I know this because when my wife had a normal screen for her pregnancy in 2006, there were no calls to make sure she knew her options and no meetings with genetic counselors. In the language of science, we had a built-in control for the variable of prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis.

Pro-choiceness hasn’t moved very far from its roots. Margaret Sanger of Planned Parenthood was an avowed eugenicist. She would have been all too happy to keep a child like our son from entering the world.

Often, the public health solution to conditions like Down syndrome is detection and “optional” abortion. A recent review indicates that around 92% of children with Down syndrome are aborted. So, for every one person with Down syndrome that you see, close your eyes and imagine the other eleven people with Down syndrome--enough to comprise a baseball team, whose “options” to live were declined. 

In order to reduce one’s distress, it is common to shift the focus. In cases like our son, “Her body, her choice,” does just that, by denying the reality of what was really in question. For us, at least, it was a matter of “his body, her choice,” and that is a different question altogether.