The Reflecting Physician

This chapter offers a narrative approach to the question of selective abortion, or, as it has been called by disability activists, eugenic abortion.¹ This refers to the widespread practice of aborting a fetus if the prenatal diagnosis indicates that the child will almost certainly have a disability. The ethical problematic of genetic testing and prenatal diagnosis has attracted much scholarly attention in the past four decades, but it would be beyond the scope of this essay to summarize even a representative part of the debate. Rather, I wish to engage with Tom Shakespeare’s call for “an ethic of individual choice”