LOOKING AT policies that are favorable towards abortion and euthanasia, we must ask: are we really motivated by concern for the lives of these individuals, or are we as “normal” people just thinking about ourselves? And about the disturbance that seeing a handicapped child might cause us or the awkwardness we face in trying to talk with someone who is dying of an illness? Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University provides a critique on our society; it should challenge our thinking. In a rather extended by poignant and piercing quote he says,

We persist in the notion that the retarded are suffering and suffering so much from being retarded that it would be better for them not to exist than to have to bear such disability. Perhaps what we assume is not that the retarded suffer from being retarded but rather, because they are retarded, they will suffer from being in a world like ours. They will suffer from inadequate housing, inadequate medical care, inadequate schooling, lack of love and care. They will suffer from discrimination as well as cruel kidding and treatment from unfeeling peers.
All this is certainly true, but it is not an argument for preventing retardation in the name of preventing suffering; rather it is an argument for changing the nature of the world in the interest of preventing such needless suffering we impose on the retarded. Too often the suffering we wish to spare them is the result of our unwillingness to change our lives so that those disabled might have a better life.

When Patricia Bauer attends a dinner party and runs into an Ivy League Ethics professor who says “he believes that prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo prenatal testing and to terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth a child with a disability, because it was immoral to subject a child to the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure,” I think it is a fair question to ask why this professor is so concerned. Is it truly for the child?

Or is it unwillingness on the part of the rest of us to have our concepts of convenience, the good life, and value, stretched?

Hans Reinders, Professor of Ethics and intellectual Disability at the Vrike Universiteit Amsterdam, like Hauerwas, suggests that when we have a relationship with some disabled person, we are forced to face the painful truth of our own limits (see Blackwell companion to Christian Ethics). Are we bothered by other people’s imperfections because it reminds us of the fact that our lives are not perfect?

I certainly have no room to point a finger; but I desire change, and that is why I think, and that is why I write. For when we are confronted with truth, ignorance is no longer an option, we are now accountable to that truth, and the only decent response is action.