Rayna Rapp, a former abortion clinic worker, interviewed women getting genetic testing to find out if their babies would be disabled or have a genetic problem. Here are some things that people said about why they would abort a down syndrome baby:
“The bottom line is when my neighbor said to me: “Having a “tard,” that’s a bummer for life.”
…
“I have a cousin, my mother’s sister’s son, he’s retarded and 38. Oh, it isn’t Down’s, it’s something else. He’s done fine, he’s likely to live a normal life, to die at 80. But it’s really messed up the rest of the family. My aunt give up a lot of her life… I’m not that selfless, I don’t want to live like that.”
…
“I would have a very hard time dealing with a retarded child. Retardation is relative, it could be so negligible that the child is normal, or so severe that the child has nothing… All of the sharing things you want to do, the things you want to share with a child – that, to me, is the essence of being a father. There would be a big void that I would feel. I would feel grief, not having what I consider a normal family.”
Click here to sign up for daily pro-life news alerts from LifeNews.com
“I have an image of how I want to interact with my child, and that’s not the kind of interaction I want, not the kind I could maintain.”
…..
“I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t be that kind of mother who accepts everything, loves her kid no matter what. What about me? Maybe it’s selfish, I don’t know. But I just didn’t want all those problems in my life.”
Rayna Rapp Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: the Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999)
To some, they may seem like good reasons. But keep in mind that abortions of down syndrome babies are usually late-term abortions, performed after 16 to 20 weeks. Below is a picture of a 16-week-old unborn baby. A baby like this would be completely torn apart in an abortion procedure
LifeNews.com Note: Sarah Terzo is a pro-life liberal who runs ClinicQuotes.com, a web site devoted to exposing the abortion industry. She is a member of the pro-life groups PLAGAL and Secular Pro-Life.
