Cover image for The beautiful unwanted : Down syndrome in myth, memoir, and bioethics
Title:
The beautiful unwanted : Down syndrome in myth, memoir, and bioethics
Publication Date:
2023
Publication Information:
Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2023.
Physical Description:
196 pages ; 23 cm
ISBN:
9780228019008
Abstract:
Prenatal genetic testing has changed the circumstances under which parents choose what pregnancies to carry to term. Some have predicted that as a result of parents' choices, people with Down syndrome will disappear from our communities in the near future. Chris Kaposy, a bioethicist who has a son with Down syndrome, reflects on parenting his son in the midst of this supposed disappearance. Writing from a pro-choice, disability-positive perspective, Kaposy presents some of the decades-old bioethical controversies involving children with Down syndrome, illustrating a prehistory of disappearance that has shaped current attitudes toward intellectual disability. Layered throughout this history are elements of Kaposy's personal experience with his son and family. The Beautiful Unwanted encompasses the changeling myths of Newfoundland, the "discovery" of Down syndrome by John Langdon Down and Jérôme Lejeune, and the twentieth-century experience of institutionalization, as well as recent advances in reproductive technology. We must recognize that we have some control over the future, Kaposy argues, and we must ask what kind of future we want for those who have intellectual disabilities.
Contents:
Progress -- Life Decisions -- Making Predictions -- Don't Talk about Eugenics -- Philosophers -- Hidden versus Normal -- Down -- Bourgeois -- Portraits -- Baby Doe -- Deployments -- Lineage.
Language:
English
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