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  • Beauty, the Person, and Disability:Understanding (and Defending) the Intrinsic Beauty and Value of the Person with Disabilities
  • Theresa Farnan

In February 2012, the British Journal of Medical Ethics published a paper that garnered notoriety for its central premise. In “After birth abortion: why should the baby live?” authors Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva argue that infanticide as well as abortion should be legal in cases of babies born with disabilities.1 They focus on two disabilities—Treacher Collins syndrome and Down syndrome—as instances where infanticide should be permitted.

Let me state at the outset that I absolutely reject their claim that unborn and newborn human beings lack the moral status of personhood, as well as their abhorrent conclusion that it is acceptable to kill them.2 In this paper, however, I would like to focus on a more subtle aspect of their [End Page 132] argument. Giubilini and Minerva argue specifically that killing is acceptable, even justifiable, in the case of two particular disabilities involving distinctive, sometimes disfiguring, physical and facial characteristics. While Giubilini and Minerva avoid discussing whether an infant’s present or predicted appearance may influence parents’ perception of the child’s value, the authors’ choice of visible, distinctive disabilities seems designed to create the mental image of a human being who is “other” and “less than” as a way to reinforce their claim that these infants lack the moral status of personhood.3

I have two goals in this paper. First, I will follow the logic of Giubilini and Minerva’s argument and demonstrate that it leads to the absolute affirmation of parent preference over the rights of the child, even after birth, regardless of the presence or absence of disability, and potentially on the basis of appearance alone. Second, I will reflect on the way that disability in human persons presents difficulties for our attempts to understand and define beauty. If we accept as given that beauty is related in a meaningful way to goodness, and therefore perfection, then the visible, sometimes shocking, physical imperfections that can be present in the disabled person would seem automatically to exclude him or her from being considered beautiful. And yet, if beauty were related in a meaningful way to goodness, it would seem that persons with disabilities like Down syndrome, many of whom are cog-nitively incapable of malice, should be considered among the most beautiful human beings. The exclusion of these persons from the beautiful undercuts the relationship of the beautiful with the good. Accordingly, in this paper, I will argue that persons with disabilities challenge us to look more carefully at the meaning of beauty in the human person.

Moreover, the arguments by Giubilini and Minerva, as well as arguments previously made by Peter Singer, are not merely academic; there are real consequences for persons with disabilities as well as for the rest of [End Page 133] society, since the premises these authors advance influence policy discussions and the actual practice of medicine.4 With the advent of genetic testing, both before and after birth, a person diagnosed with a disability, especially one that is disfiguring or aesthetically unappealing, is vulnerable to eugenic abortion or infanticide in order to accommodate the parents’ desire for an attractive or at least “normal looking” child. This is not, as it is so often presented, a private choice. The acceptance of eugenic abortion and infanticide has grave implications for the society that tolerates or encourages such intentional killing of innocent life.5 [End Page 134]

Beauty as a stumbling block for acceptance

Imagine that you are an expectant or new mother or father who receives this description of your unborn child (Down syndrome): Your child will have “a distinct facial appearance”—a small head with “flattened facial features,” a protruding tongue, small, low-set ears and eyes slanting upward, to a degree that is “unusual for the child’s ethnic group.” He or she will have a shortened neck, “broad short hands with a single crease in the palm,” “relatively short fingers and small hands and feet,” and “”oor muscle tone.”6 He or she may have “excess skin at the nape of the neck and “separated joints between...

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