Thursday, May 10, 2012

Respect: beyond the pro-life and pro-choice arguments

I have no religious biases towards a "pro-life" point of view. And I think this entire debate going on in the western world misses the point most of the time. Yet it bothers me every time a doctor has "advised" me or another mother to make sure that the foetus is "healthy" and when a doctor asks me "if I didn't know about Sid before he was born".

It bothers me that homogenization is seen as a virtue from milk to people with 46 chromosomes. We respect and celebrate diversity in every other part of our life. Yet, a child with a disability is primarily a tax burden, not a contributor to this diversity (and the word disability should be in quotes because much is treatable today). This is the reason hospitals push tests over and over again.

How is it that to bring differently abled kids to earth is to burden society? It is regretfully the current view of suffering (we have been led to believe that to be different from the throng is to suffer), and of happiness (read: we are happy when we pay less taxes and when the world is utterly homogenized; and once we all have perfectly blue-eyed children there will no more suffering in the world). No offense to those with blue-eyed children, I think they are really cute.

Unfortunately, in a topic that I think should be about (a) human values and ethics, and (b) understanding of the real causes of suffering, the predominant views are religious and "progressive" and of course they have no middle ground. The minute an argument arises from your religion's perspective, you alienate over 50% of the world that does not share your religion. And this sort of argument can never change anything for the better. You are simply shifting the homogenization to your religion and your views.

We respect eco-diversity, we go to lengths to see that species are not extinguished, we realize that nature in the wild hangs in delicate balance, and every species that is endangered potentially endangers this balance. Yet we run campaigns and brainwash people into exterminating people with Trisomy 21. We are convinced that this is easier for us and better for society. It is just as easy as exterminating a girl child is easy. And it is as biased and short-sighted.

I am trying to end my blogs by bringing threads together with "what I am trying to say" section. I realize that I have biases in this discussion. I also realize that not everybody can take on new challenges, and for some people any unexpected challenge can tip them over the cliff of their precariously balanced life. But most of us, I imagine, do not live like that. While I respect that we all have a choice in whatever we do, in the children we have, there is still room for openness and acceptance of the new and extraordinary. Perhaps when we stretch our arms in new directions, we will find (like many have before us) strange and new horizons open up, and a richness and newness to our days (challenging as they may be) that was unimaginable before.

As a side note, I have seen several news items about kids with DS being abandoned in Indian hospitals.  Aamir Khan's show on female foeticide is on everybody's mind this week (and I hope it will be for more than a week). I naively thought there could be discussion about this rampant bias through the world (and India) against fetuses with genetic abnormalities that are labeled inferior. But I now realize that a culture that does not care about taking the life of a 50% shareholder in the population can never even begin to care about children that bear the stigma of being under developed and burdens to society.

Respect first and foremost, respect women, respect children, respect diversity and the world will be fine.

1 comment:

nazir said...

Love your thoughts here Vaish!