Soft Eugenics and Autonomy: "Didn't you get amnio?"

Dylan Matthews objects to the use of the word "eugenics" to describe the overwhelming frequency with which Downs Syndrome babies are aborted:

As practiced in the United States, eugenics involved the forced sterilization of grown women, without their knowledge, with a disproportionately large number of African-American and American Indian women affected. In other words, it was the practice of denying women reproductive choice and autonomy. Kind of like, oh I don't know, Sarah Palin and Michael Gerson want to do.

This might seem like a gotcha post, but there's a really serious point here. Eugenics wasn't murder. Eugenics was the denial of choice. The victims weren't the prospective children of the sterilized. The victims were the women. So it's not only false when Gerson uses "eugenics" as synonymous with abortion, it's extremely disrespectful to the victims and to the concept of women's personal autonomy generally.

This post was triggered by a Michael Gerson column that, as someone as sharp as Matthews should have seen, directly addresses the ways in which eugenic abortion limits personal autonomy:

This is properly called eugenic abortion—the ending of "imperfect" lives to remove the social, economic and emotional costs of their existence. And this practice cannot be separated from the broader social treatment of people who have disabilities. By eliminating less perfect humans, deformity and disability become more pronounced and less acceptable. Those who escape the net of screening are often viewed as mistakes or burdens. A tragic choice becomes a presumption—"Didn't you get an amnio?"—and then a prejudice. And this feeds a social Darwinism in which the stronger are regarded as better, the dependent are viewed as less valuable, and the weak must occasionally be culled.

The decision to carry a mentally retarded child to term means something different in a world where ninety percent of women in that position choose not to. In such a world, the assumption will be that the mother is either a well-to-do woman who can comfortably afford to have an extraordinary child—call it "Variations on a Theme of Angelina Jolie"—or a pro-lifer whose (self-imposed) absolutist beliefs are responsible for her situation. It will be fair to assume that no normal woman would have borne the child since, after all, normal women don't. The child is transformed from something his mother accepted to something the woman brought on herself.

If I were still an undergraduate, I would turn to this thought experiment: let's say you don't want to comply with some request of mine; if I give a dollar in exchange for compliance to everyone else but you, then you should definitely stand your ground, but if I give a million dollars to everyone else, then it begins to look like coercion. Eugenic abortion changes the stakes of having a child with disabilities, and to invoke autonomy as the bright line between "real" and soft eugenics only makes sense in a world where the decisions of others have no effect on me. Basically, I have played the Man is a Political Animal card, which everybody knows is to Autonomy as Jews in the Basement is to Kantian Deontology. Your play, Matthews.

UPDATE: More on disability and pro-life conservatism here.