Discrimination against the disabled?

I heard in the news today that IHC, a NZ advocacy group for intellectually disabled children, has “lodged a complaint with the Human Rights Commission against the Government for what it says are ‘discriminatory’ policies.” The claim is that “government policy [prevents] disabled students accessing the curriculum at their local school.”

That got me thinking about some other ways that disabled children are discriminated against, and prevented from accessing not just the curriculum, but the school of life itself: prenatal diagnosis, and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD). These are techniques for determining whether an unborn child has certain disabilities.

A common condition that prenatal diagnosis tests for is Down’s Syndrome; mothers whose unborn baby is detected as having Down’s are normally advised to have an abortion. Down’s Syndrome children are probably the main beneficiaries of IHC’s advocacy – provided they make it to the outside world.

Prenatal diagnosis has been around in various forms for a while (for example, amniocentesis), but PGD is a more recent technique, used primarily in conjunction with IVF to screen out unwanted embryos. Again, Down’s Syndrome is one of the abnormalities that PGD tests for. Both forms of diagnosis have in most cases the objective of eliminating unborn children who don’t measure up to certain standards of “health” or “quality of life”.

The Ministry of Health’s National Ethics Committee on Assisted Human Reproduction has published a document called Guidelines on Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. There were at least a couple of statements in there that caught my attention. The first is their description of PGD:

PGD is a procedure used to test early human embryos for serious inherited genetic conditions and chromosomal abnormalities. PGD involves several steps:
1. the creation of an embryo via in vitro fertilisation (IVF)
2. removal of one or two cells from the embryo
3. genetic testing of these cells for specific genetic conditions or chromosomal abnormalities
4. the subsequent transfer of unaffected embryos to a woman’s uterus.

This is accurate as far as it goes, but what they don’t mention is step 5: “destroy those embryos showing signs of specific genetic conditions or chromosomal abnormalities”. It seems to me that it would be difficult to get more discriminatory than this.

The second statement that I wanted to highlight is this one:

Concern has been raised that PGD discriminates against people with disabilities, and promotes the view that the birth of people with disabilities should be prevented. However, it is important to distinguish between ‘disability’ and ‘people with disabilities’, and that selecting against embryos with disabilities does not necessarily imply that those with disabilities are living lives that are either less valuable or less meaningful.

Uh, what? I had to read that a couple of times, because the second sentence really doesn’t follow from the first. PGD absolutely discriminates against people with disabilities: that’s what it is designed to do.

But here’s where the doublespeak really kicks in:

NECAHR supports the New Zealand Disability Strategy and considers that New Zealand should continue to recognise its obligations to support disabled people and continue to work towards the removal of barriers to full participation in society.

I would have thought that termination counts as a spectacularly massive barrier to full participation in society. I wonder what IHC’s perspective on this is?