The shadow of Monchberg

Here's another quote from Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics, that I wanted to share. It's from a mother with an interesting story. She grew up in Germany with a disabled brother who, if born 10 years earlier would have been sent to a concentration camp called Monchberg and killed in a gas chamber because of his disability. Years later, she moved to the US, studied, married and had children. When pregnant with her third child, she was told that her son would have Down Syndrome. She and her husband chose to proceed with the pregnancy against medical advice and much opposition from others around her. What really surprised her though, was the way people acted after she had given birth to her son, Peter:

I found, to my great surprise, that society still kept asking this question: Why did you have this baby? I have had people react with marked surprise when they hear that I knew Petey would have Down Syndrome before he was born. Though they do not ask aloud, you can see the question in their eyes: 'If you knew, why did you have the baby?' What's buried in the question, what's buried deep in their eyes as they ask it, is the perception of my son as 'a choice' -- specifically, my choice -- rather than as a unique human being, created in God's image, rather than as a fully fledged member of the human race.

What I see in their eyes is the lingering shadow of Monchberg that sometimes keeps me awake at night. I worry that the joint availability of tests and abortion seems to be eroding societal consensus about our collective responsibility for vulnerable people -- people with disabilities whose conditions were or could have been diagnosed prenatally, or even people born into difficult family situations or social structures. I am very frightened by the emerging attitude that if a woman exercises her 'choice' to have a child who can be identified in advance as 'vulnerable' for some reason, the woman herself bears the responsibility for dealing with that vulnerability. In other words, if the cost of a certain life is going to be more than its 'worth', someone has to make up the deficit. The assumption seems to be that if you 'choose' to impose that cost on society by having a baby you could so easily have aborted, you should pay the price.