Dominic Lawson: Our double standards on abortion

Why is it discriminatory to abort on grounds of sexual identity, but acceptable if a baby might be disabled?

The women's movement saw this one coming a long time ago. It's more than 20 years since the publication of Mary Anne Warren's Gendercide: the Implications of Sex Selection. The American feminist author envisaged the time when people would be able to select embryos according to sex, and worried about what should then be the appropriate attitude to take if the result was the systematic removal of those with two X chromosomes.

Having asked if "gendercide" would be "no less an atrocity than genocide", Warren's conclusion was that choosing the sex of one's child was wrong only if its intent was discrimination against women. Or in other words, the act is neither right nor wrong - it is the thought behind it that counts.

In Friday's edition of this newspaper Joan Bakewell, with characteristic courage and honesty, sought to tackle this issue head on. Her reason was that a Delhi doctor had been sentenced to a jail term of two years for providing the abortion of a female foetus, on grounds of gender. Given that an estimated five million females have been "selectively" aborted in India since this practice was made illegal 12 years ago, you might well think that the authorities have not been exactly vigilant. But how many Indian women would have the courage to make a formal complaint, even if - or perhaps especially if - they were bullied into the abortion by their husband?

The reason for "gendercide" in India is all too obvious: in most of the country's states - with Kerala being a notable exception - women are seen as an economic burden. Only the most menial jobs are available to them, they do not inherit land or property, and in recognition of this their parents must pay potentially crippling dowries when they are married off.

Joan Bakewell asked the consequent question: "Where does that leave those of us in favour of a woman's right to choose? Isn't there something incongruous about regretting the abortion rate as it operates in India while defending abortion in this country?" She thinks the answer is no: "Abortion in Britain is there to deal with abnormalities of the foetus and to prevent the birth of a baby that is not wanted to a woman who never intended to get pregnant in the first place. This is not a case of sex discrimination in the womb."

Let's leave aside the question of whether this means that if a British woman changes her mind and decides to abort a "planned" child, she is committing a worse act than if the same child had been created "by accident". The more interesting question is: why is it unacceptably discriminatory to abort a baby on grounds of sexual identity, but completely acceptable to abort a child because it might be disabled?

As Radhika Balakrishnan wrote in The Social Context of Sex Selection and The Politics of Abortion in India (Harvard School of Public Health 1994): "As feminists we need to be very careful in agreeing to the use of technology for one kind of genetic selection and not another. The justifications used to abort female foetuses are often the same as those used by people who want to abort foetuses diagnosed with medical abnormalities - that they are expensive to maintain, less productive and detrimental to the financial wellbeing of parents."

I am familiar with these arguments: in June 1995 I became the father of a little girl, Domenica, with Down's Syndrome. Not long afterwards I wrote an article critical of the tendency of the medical profession to encourage the weeding out of such children through somewhat risky antenatal tests with abortion as the heavily promoted "solution."

Claire Rayner then wrote a piece in this newspaper in which she criticised us for not having prenatal tests. "The Lawsons," wrote this former nurse, "will not be paying the full price of their choice" and society would have to bear the burden of the "misery" of Domenica's life.

Not surprisingly, the Down's Syndrome Association asked Claire Rayner to resign as a patron. As a body, it knows more than any other that the most dangerous false belief about this most common form of congenital abnormality is that Down's is a form of suffering - as if it was a disease - and that those who have it are nothing but a burden upon society. Leave aside the fact that people with Down's are anything but a "misery", I have learnt more about the nature of humanity from Domenica than from any book I have ever read - and I suspect that a similar sentiment would be expressed by most parents in my position.

It is certainly true that parents of children with genetic abnormalities do not bear the full cost of the special care that might be needed. But as Brian Wilson, a Labour MP who has a teenage son with Down's, argued in a newspaper article a few years ago, a society which attempts a cost-benefit analysis of any child that might be born is moving in a dangerous direction. His thoughts were provoked by a British Medical Journal paper which purported to demonstrate that while the screening costs were £38,000 "to avoid a Down's Syndrome child", the lifetime caring costs of such a child would be £120,000. Leave aside the sinister euphemism of "avoiding" a person; as Brian Wilson points out, "about 400 unborn children without Down's Syndrome die each year as a result of amniocentisis carried out to identify 100 unborn children with the condition."

While I don't think that unborn children with disabilities should enjoy any special right to life, it is striking that under British law they are specifically discriminated against: it is illegal to abort a foetus of more than 24 weeks gestation, but the 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act made it legal to abort babies with any abnormality right up to the moment of natural birth. As a recent court case appeared to demonstrate, such a qualifying abnormality could be as slight, and as treatable, as a cleft palate.

This is not, in numerical terms, a big problem; unlike the extraordinary numbers of girls aborted in India, the number of children with abnormalities aborted each year in this country is about 2,000, about 1 per cent of the (shockingly large) total. But when Joan Bakewell concludes by saying that "ours is a value system I'd like to see spreading around the world", as far as the British way of abortion is concerned, I cannot share her pride.

d.lawson@independent.co.uk