https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.htmlThis article was one of my favorite class readings in my undergrad Communication Ethics class way back in 2013. When I read it Peter Singer's ideas at the time outraged me, but living through my own experience as an autistic adult, and seeing my mom martyr herself to be a slave for my even more disabled brother has changed my perspective. My argument is simple: pre-natal testing for disabilities should be mandatory, and any fetus found to be possibly disabled should be subjected to a state mandated abortion.
My brother lives with Level 2 autism and severe mental illness. At the height of his illness he was a zombie and couldn't even wipe his own ass he had gained so much weight. While he is thankfully now living his best life, my mom continues to infantilize him, washing and wiping his ass and balls daily. She is at the point where she feels like she will have a heart attack if things don't change, but she also refuses to put him in a group home or even just re-teach him to be more independent. She thinks if she doesn't do everything for him that he will literally die.
Now these are consequences of capitalism, but even in a perfect socialist society that was compassionate to the disabled, we would still have a lower quality of life and be at a disadvantage than our neurotypical and/or able bodied peers. Severe OCD, anxiety, and ASD led me to give up on a lot of my career goals and dreams. I now work a simple wfh job doing the same daily repetitive tasks. If I didn't have these disabilities, I would be able to live on my own and probably could have become a filmmaker, public historian, archivist, etc. I'm really sick of disability activists saying we shouldn't try to cure disability, and hysterically claiming pre-natal testing is eugenics.