Controversy of Pre-natal Diagnosing - Research Paper Example

According to medical professionals, policymakers and other interest groups, prenatal testing provide parents the choice of therapeutic abortion freeing them from reproductive risk by preempting the birh of a child with a genetic disease thus liberating them from the financial and emotional burden and distress that the child and the family may experience from “interpersonal, intrafamilial and intergenerational relations” (Ekberg, 2007, 67). The idea was to detect fetal defect and to give expectant mothers “choices” if possible abnormality in the fetus is detected.

While this may seem to be a medical breakthrough of giving expectant mothers advance information about the health and well being of their upcoming babies, this has however raised a number of disturbing issues. Rather than focusing more on the health and well being of both the babies and the mother, the issue redounded to a cold hearted cost benefit assessment that it will be more cost efficient to “terminate a birth” than to spend for the care of a disabled child. . It also assumes that a fetus which has been diagnosed with abnormality through prenatal diagnosing will have no chance to live a productive, meaningful and rewarding life.

It immediately passed a judgment that a child with disability will become an automatic liability to the family and society without a chance to recover nor to live a meaningful life. It is an assumption that is based on the impression on what is probable without inquiring on the state and well-being of the disabled child and his/her families. It also reinforces an intolerant society that discriminates against a trait and persons that does not fit to what the generally constructed concept of normalcy in society.

Where before parents had control as to the quantity of childbirth, now it seeks control as to the quality of a child by terminating the birth of a fetus that may have potential defects. It is an impression that is misinformed because when studies were made “on children and families affected by disabilities indicated that disability does not preclude a satisfying life (Asch, 1999, 1649). Further, in a study conducted in 1995 revealed that a child’s disability did not affect the lives of their families and the needs and concerns of those family with disabled child were strikingly similar compared to a family with a normal child.

What was distinguishable was only the complexity of the arrangement that is needed to balance the responsibilities at work and home (qtd. in Freedman et al, 1995) , Asch furtherly articulated that “these professions fail people with disabilities, by concluding that because there may never be full physical recovery, there is never a regrouping of physical, cognitive, and psychological resources with which to participate in a rewarding life (Asch, 1999, 1650).