When people view a successful person with a permanent mental disability, often they picture someone who has overcome the odds; someone who has fought their whole life to be brave and claw their way to where they are. While many would stand in awe and openly state how amazing it was how someone with a disability could be successful, what they say is not always what they honestly believe.
In her article “The Abortion Debate No One Wants to Have”, Patricia E. Bauer discusses Abortion and Down’s Syndrome, and how society’s prejudice makes circumstantial abortion acceptable. Bauer writes about her daughter, Margaret, who was born with Down’s syndrome. She discusses her warm love for her daughter, and her pain in the way Margaret is viewed by society.
She opens up by alluding to a controversial quote by William Bennett, in which he stated “You could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”. She invites the reader to think about why it is a huge controversy for a man to say that about one group of people, but it is widely accepted to consider abortion okay in the circumstance of a mental disability. Right there, she already has the reader viewing the hypocrisy in the idea that many believe it is rightful to abort a baby when tests during pregnancy show the baby to have a disability. She says “why then do we as a society view abortion as justified and unremarkable in the case of another class of people: children with disabilities?”.
By saying “we”, as opposed to say, society, she brings the reader to a personal level, showing she is not viewing herself as someone on a pedestal, but rather just someone also influenced by the bias of the world. She uses imagery when describing her daughter’s “big blue eyes” and her feeling of joy she got when she “got our first inkling that there was a full-fledged person behind them.” This gives the reader a mental image of a human being, so that the reader is forced to see her as a human being,…
