Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

As always, the question this week comes from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions. And I need to say something before I even get to it: last week’s question was already one of the harder ones I’ve tackled in this series. I said that life is precious. I meant it. I still mean it. And then I turned the page, and Gregory Stock looked me square in the eyes and said, “Oh, you think that was heavy? Hold my book.”

Because this week is a follow-up to last week. And it goes further.

Here’s the question:

What are your feelings about killing a severely handicapped baby at birth if the parents can’t — or won’t — care for him, and he’d require institutional care his entire life?

I’ll be honest with you. I stared at that for a while.

Last Week, Briefly

If you weren’t here last week, the quick version is this: the question was whether you would abort a pregnancy if you knew the child would be severely disabled and die by the age of five. My answer was no. Not because I was dismissing how hard that situation would be, and not because I don’t understand why someone might land differently. But because I believe — genuinely, in a way that isn’t just theoretical — that life is precious, that even a short life is not a lesser life, and that a five-year-old dying beloved and surrounded by people who showed up for them is not a tragedy in the way we typically mean that word.

I said my “no” costs me nothing right now. I said the belief in the preciousness of life comes with obligations that extend past the delivery room. I acknowledged my own contradictions. I tried to be honest about all of it.

I’m going to try to bring that same honesty to this week. But I want to be upfront: this one hit differently.

Where I Actually Land

I find this question disturbing. Not in the way where I think Gregory Stock was being careless or cruel by including it — I think discomfort is often exactly where the most important thinking happens, and that’s the whole point of this book. But I want to name the feeling before I try to reason through it, because it’s real: reading this question made something in me recoil.

Because we are not talking about a hypothetical pregnancy anymore. We are talking about a baby. A person who has already arrived. A human being who has done nothing except be born into circumstances that are difficult and complicated and painful — and whose life is now being weighed against inconvenience, against cost, against the limits of institutional systems that, frankly, humans built and could build differently if we chose to.

My feelings about it? I think it’s wrong. I think it’s deeply, fundamentally wrong. I think the same principle I articulated last week — that life is precious, that a life doesn’t have to be long or typical or easy to be valuable — applies here with, if anything, even more force. A newborn is not a problem to be managed. A disability is not a reason to subtract a person from the world.

I’m going to say that clearly and without softening it, because I think it deserves to be said clearly: I don’t believe this should be an option. Full stop.

The Part Where I Acknowledge What’s Actually Being Asked

I want to be fair to the question, though, because I think it’s designed to surface something real about how people think — and the honest answer is that some people have thought this, and some still do, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

The logic being tested here is a utilitarian one: if a life will require significant resources, if the parents can’t or won’t provide care, if institutional care is the only alternative — is the calculus different? Does the math change?

And I want to be honest: I understand why someone might feel the pull of that logic. I’m not going to pretend it requires bad intentions to get there. Sometimes people are asking a real question about suffering — whose, and how much, and whether bringing someone into a life of it is kindness or its opposite.

But here’s where I get off that train: that logic has a history, and the history is not good.

The Word I Think Needs to Be Named

The formal term for the idea that some lives are worth preserving and others aren’t, based on disability, capacity, or perceived quality of life, is eugenics. And I don’t use that word lightly, and I’m not using it as a rhetorical grenade. I’m using it because it’s accurate, and because the conversation gets a lot more honest when we call things what they are.

Eugenics has been practiced by governments, endorsed by scientists, and institutionalized in law. The results are among the darkest chapters in modern history. And the core premise — that we can evaluate a human life and decide it does not meet the threshold for continuation — is not one I’m willing to accept, dressed up in soft language or otherwise.

The disability community has been making this argument for decades, and they’ve made it better than I can. The idea that a disabled life is a diminished life, a lesser life, a life not worth the trouble — that’s not a neutral medical assessment. It is a value judgment, and it is one that disabled people themselves overwhelmingly and loudly reject. Organizations representing people with disabilities have consistently pushed back against frameworks that treat disability as a reason to withhold care or, in the most extreme cases, existence.

When the people most affected by a question are telling us something clearly, we should probably listen.

Back to the Question Itself

I said last week that I believe life is precious in a bone-deep, not-just-a-bumper-sticker kind of way. This week just asks me to apply that same belief one step further — and honestly, it’s not a difficult step once you’ve already taken the first one.

If a five-year life has value, so does a life lived with disability. If we’re not willing to make the call before birth based on prognosis, I don’t see a coherent argument for making a different call once the person is already here. The logic doesn’t flip at the point of delivery.

What does flip is the responsibility. Once a child is born, there are systems — imperfect, underfunded, often inadequate, but real — that exist to ensure that child is cared for. The answer to parents who can’t or won’t provide care is not to eliminate the child. It is to do the harder, more expensive, more demanding work of building the kind of society where no one is abandoned because their needs are inconvenient.

That’s the part where I’ll point again to something I said last week: I have a genuine problem with a politic that fights loudly for a life to exist and then goes quiet when it comes time to fund the systems that would actually support that life. The belief in the value of human life is not a position you get to hold selectively. It requires you to follow through.

The Honest Admission

I said last week that I’m working on my inconsistencies. Here’s another one to add to the pile: I believe every life is precious, and I also get genuinely impatient with able-bodied adults who make fully preventable bad decisions on a daily basis. The person who cut me off in traffic this morning got less grace from me than I’m extending to this hypothetical.

I’m aware of that. I’m sitting with it. I’m not sure what to do with it except to keep being honest about it and to keep trying to let my stated values shape my actual instincts over time.

That’s all any of us can do, probably.

Your Turn

I want to hear from you on this one — and I want to be especially clear that if your experience includes raising a child with significant disabilities, or if you yourself have lived with disability, your perspective matters more in this conversation than mine does. I’m reasoning from the outside. You may be reasoning from somewhere much closer.

Where do you land? Does the question feel different to you after birth than it did before? Do you think the disability community’s objection to this framework changes how you think about it?

Leave your thoughts in the comments. Respectfully, please — this is exactly the kind of question where the comment section either becomes a place of genuine exchange or a place where nobody feels safe saying anything real. I’d much rather it be the former.

Until next week — this is Aaron, at The Confusing Middle, still believing in life. Loudly. Even when the question makes that complicated.

Feature Photo by Mayara Caroline Mombelli