‘Medics must stop pressuring women to abort disabled babies’

Doctors must stop pressuring women to abort unborn children deemed to have a disability, a senior columnist has said.

Writing for the Daily Mail, columnist and former editor of The Sunday Telegraph Dominic Lawson criticised medics for terrifying parents with “horror stories” about children born with conditions such as Down’s syndrome and spina bifida.

When Lawson’s daughter Domenica was born with Down’s Syndrome, he said doctors claimed “she might well never walk or talk”. But being unable to walk is not associated with the condition and, at 27-years-old, Lawson said Domenica is “far from unusual in having an enormous vocabulary”.

‘Guilty’

In Britain, babies deemed to have such conditions can be aborted up to birth, well beyond the usual 24-week limit.

Lawson commented on the recent Channel 4 documentary, Disability And Abortion: The Hardest Choice, in which disability campaigner Maire Lea-Wilson spoke of the pressure to abort her now three-year-old son who also has Down’s syndrome.

She explained how she had told medics she didn’t want to talk about abortion but they kept offering it: “We were asked on three occasions if we wanted to abort him, the last time a few days before he was born.”

She added: “They made us feel that bringing a child like Aidan into the world would be a really bad thing. For a while it made me feel guilty.”

Eugenics

Lawson blasted such “eugenicism within the medical profession, manifested in unwarranted and insistent pressure on mothers to terminate pregnancies deemed ‘unhealthy’.

“So: a woman’s right to choose, constrained by the right of medics to push her into making the choice they think is the right one.”

The 1967 Abortion Act allows abortion up to birth if “there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical and mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped”.

The columnist called for the word “suffer” to be removed from the Act, saying: “It is this word, which the medical profession persists in using, which must sway so many parents to follow their advice and terminate: who wants a child that just ‘suffers’?”

Campaign

Earlier this year, Down’s syndrome campaigner Heidi Crowter said she hopes Britain’s abortion law will be changed following her hearing at the Court of Appeal.

Last year the High Court rejected her case – a decision which was appealed. A ruling is not expected before October.

Heidi is married to James who also has Down’s syndrome.

Speaking to The Christian Institute, she said: “At the moment, the law states that a baby without Down’s syndrome can be aborted up to 24 weeks, but a baby with Down’s syndrome like me and James can be aborted up to birth.”