A pro-life man with autism made the case, during a recent March for Life event in Virginia, for why unborn babies with disabilities shouldn’t be aborted.
“Basically, I’m trying to encourage people to not abort children with disabilities,” he told the Daily Caller, noting that even though “we are getting better at detecting disabilities,” that is not a reason to terminate a pregnancy.
“A lot of people think, ‘Oh, they’ll have disabilities, their life is going to suck, and it will be terrible,’” he explained. “[But] you really should not have that viewpoint. I am learning it is possible to have a happy life as a person with disabilities.”
The young man went on to tell the conservative outlet that people with disabilities are often portrayed as outcasts and losers “who have no friends.” That, though, is not “what has happened to me at all,” he said.
His impassioned plea comes as abortion advocates on the left have become increasingly comfortable with the idea of terminating pregnancies if prenatal screenings indicate the not-yet-born child could have developmental disabilities, like autism or Down syndrome.
According to 2018 data from Gallup, Americans are split in half over whether it should be legal to abort a child in the first three months of pregnancy after learning he or she “would be born with Down syndrome.” Forty-nine percent said it should be legal and 48% said it should be illegal. There is a much greater disparity between those who say it should be legal (29%) and illegal (68%) in the last three months of pregnancy.
A Marist poll from 2019 showed more than half of Americans (62%) oppose abortion in cases involving Down syndrome.
All of this comes against the backdrop of a 2017 story from CBS News that reported Iceland is “close to eradicating Down syndrome.” Further reading, though, revealed the country hasn’t “eradicated” the disability. Instead, women were just aborting their unborn children whose prenatal screenings tested positive for Down syndrome.
The progressive outlet The Nation ran a story in 2018, accusing Republicans (and pro-lifers) of “using fear of eugenics” and the “public’s positive feelings about cute kids with Down syndrome” to “undermine reproductive rights.”