UN Disabilities’ Czar Lambasts “Liberal Eugenics” But Promotes Abortion

By | April 23, 2020

Catalina Devandas Aguilar, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

NEW YORK, April 24 (C-Fam) A UN human rights expert on disabilities criticized “prenatal testing, selective abortion and preimplantation genetic diagnosis” in a report to UN member states, but fell short of calling for an end to the selective abortion of children with disabilities.

Even though there may be no coercive eugenic government programs, “in a context of widespread prejudice and discrimination against persons with disabilities, the aggregate effect of many individual choices are likely to produce eugenic outcomes,” the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Catalina Devandas Aguilar said in her report to the UN Human Rights Council focused on bioethics.

Specifically writing about prenatal testing and selective abortion Devandas Aguilar says, “there is a concern that such practices may reinforce and socially validate the message that persons with disabilities ought not to have been born.”

Overall, Devandas Aguilar calls for a “return to a bioethics informed by human rights.” But she falls short of recognizing the human right to life of children with disabilities in the womb, which international experts say is to be presumed in binding international law.

Devandas Aguilar appeared mostly concerned with what she calls the “hegemony of ableism” and the social “stigma” attached to disabilities.

She criticizes “ableist social norms and market pressures” that she says “make it imperative to have the ‘best possible child’ with the best possible chances at life” as well as new theories that justify “genetic enhancement” and giving parents “the option to euthanize their newborns with disabilities.”

Devandas Aguilar, who is herself disabled, is especially attentive to the subjective experience of persons with disabilities.

“Disability rights advocates often feel forced to justify their own worth and existence. That is a feeling shared by many persons with disabilities throughout their lives,” she explains.

While she criticizes laws that “extend the time frame for a lawful abortion or, exceptionally, permit abortion in the presence of fetal impairment” she merely says the issue of prenatal testing and selective abortion “requires greater attention.”

Devandas Aguilar went out of her way to affirm the views of other UN experts who say abortion is a human right.

“Solutions must not compromise the right of all women, including women with disabilities, to decide whether or not they want to continue with a pregnancy,” she writes.

“Ultimately, tackling ableism (through social support and better education of families) is a more effective way to address disability selective abortion,” she surmises.

Devandas Aguilar is one of over two dozen human rights experts who annually report on human rights questions to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Though such UN human rights experts routinely criticize countries by name, Devandas Aguilar appeared afraid to name countries in her report, even in egregious cases.

She criticized the “overall decrease in social acceptance and solidarity in relation to diversity and difference” from prenatal testing and abortion. But she did not mention countries like Iceland who have “eradicated” Down Syndrome or Denmark whose politicians boast of aborting up to 98% of children with Down Syndrome.

Devandas Aguilar condemned forced abortion and sterilization, but did not mention the widely-reported case in the United Kingdom where a Judge ordered an abortion on a disabled woman.

And she categorically rejected euthanasia and assisted suicide for the sole reason of having a disability, but fails to mention that in Belgium this is now a routine occurrence.

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