Another good catch by Harry of the Squaring the Globe blog: The Boston Globe today featured a story about the pressure put on parents who are pregnant with a Downs syndrome child to have an abortion.
Brian Skotko, a joint-degree student at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Medical School, last year published two research papers that concluded physicians often relay the news in an overwhelmingly negative way, focusing on the limitations and hardships a child with Down syndrome may face&“We have to decide as a society what forms of life are valuable,” Skotko said. “Do we as a society believe people should be able to terminate a pregnancy solely because the child will have Down syndrome, or any other undesired trait? Where do you draw the line?”
He then notes a National Holocaust Museum exhibit about the Nazi public health program that systematically eliminated the disabled as unworthy of life in the Third Reich.
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abortion, Downs syndrome, Nazis
