Put to the test: making prenatal choices

Christian Century, June 28, 2003 by Amy Laura Hall

Expecting Adam. By Martha Beck. Berkley, 328 pp., $13.95 paperback.

Testing Women, Testing the Fetus. By Rayna Rapp. Routledge, 361 pp., $19.95 paperback.

The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society. By Hans S. Reinders. University of Notre Dame Press, 280 pp., $35.00.

Choosing Naia. By Mitchell Zuckoff. Beacon, 301 pp., $25.00.

WE WOKE ONE MORNING last November to a spectacular display of bright white ice. While my first grader did a naked dance to celebrate the day off, we watched heavily encrusted tree limbs crash to the ground around Duke's campus. The radio reported that others in Durham, away from the university's private generators, were huddling under blankets, and we called friends and students to offer them our heated space. Soon our campus apartment was bustling with people. As I served up hot chocolate and flipped flapjacks, I was quite pleased with my role. Here, away from the brittle cold, a lovely chaos ensued, with happy children, full bellies, warm feet and a gracious host--me.

But what had been a cheerful bustle became, after 24 hours of proximity, a noisy swarm. The rainbow coalition of children playing on our floor grew both cranky--pulling hair during toy-turf battles--and dirty, as they took advantage of the mayhem to dodge baths. Ideological differences became less provocative than annoying as the adults wrangled over the class dynamics of Mary Poppins. And as time went by I attempted, through strained smiles and passive-aggressive hints, to keep my space mannered, orderly, hospitable. Over the course of our five days together I came to suspect again that true hospitality is messy and frustrating. To be truly hospitable is, to some extent, to lose control of one's space and time--to be open to the disarray and interruption of embodied life. Perhaps hospitality is most nearly proleptic when it bears the unruly wounds of the risen Christ.

Most North Americans seem ill prepared for real interruption. Most of us prefer the unexpected to occur only on screen, at predictably scheduled intervals. Our neighborhood associations, pharmaceuticals, appliances and methodical committees help us to rule out the unpredictable and to encourage efficiency. But the overt dependence brought on by an ice storm or a vomiting child rudely awakens us to need. So awakened, we often find ourselves embarrassingly out of sync with others, who continue in their guarded routines and order. Christians may read this as a sign of our society's diminishing capacity for incarnate hospitality.

Parents who care for children with disabilities are searingly aware of this decline in hospitality. Negotiating the systematic problem of underpaid and overworked teachers, as well as the inadvertantly unwelcome comments of grocery shoppers, parents of children with noticeable needs exist at the outer boundaries of inhospitable normalcy. The birth of a child who may never move out of a state of conspicuous dependence places its parents in the unseemly realm of the accidental.

Every child is truly an interuption, but the patient and expensive work of helping a child with disabilities requires a willingness to mark time differently. The challenges facing the parents are acute in a culture eager for efficient, calculable results. Perhaps, then, it should come as no surprise that nine out of every ten women who discover that their ictus has Down syndrome choose to abort.

Rayna Rapp's book on "the social impact of amniocentesis in America" has won prizes in gender studies, ethnography and anthropology. A professor at the New School for Social Research, Rapp came to the project of mapping the "construction and routinization of this technology" after she herself went through prenatal testing, a diagnosis of Down syndrome and a selective abortion. Realizing that through these procedures women are becoming "moral pioneers," Rapp set out to document and analyze the contours of the "brave new world" created by obstetric screening and technology. Her book is arguably the definitive work on prenatal testing in the U.S.

What Rapp discovers bears the weight of the decision that gave rise to her research: "This technology turns every user into a moral philosopher, as she concludes her fears and fantasies of the limits of mothering a fetus with a disability." Her thesis is that individual women are courageously negotiating the new moral choices brought by technology, and she argues that the only overriding ethical consideration regarding that technology is that there be equal, economically feasible access to the available tests and procedures. Noting that white women typically talk about their decision differently than either African-American or Latina women, Rapp tackles head-on a question that would necessitate a reevaluation of her thesis.

In this section, titled "Are White Women Selfish?" Rapp analyzes and decodes the language of "selfishness" in the self-descriptions of Anglo women. One woman, who is characteristic of these interviewees, explains, "I just couldn't do it, couldn't be that kind of mother who accepts everything, loves her kid no matter what ... Maybe it's selfish, I don't know. But I just didn't want all those problems in my life." Rather than considering the possibility that such narrations reflect genuine conflict over the question of selective abortion, Rapp suggests that these women are unwitting victims of both pro-life propaganda and an atavistic ambivalence about the entry of women into the workplace.