Is the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act Guilty of Disability Discrimination?

Abstract

South Africa’s Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act of 1996 implicitly expresses the attitude that the prenatal detection of foetal abnormality justifies selective abortion, even at a stage when abortion is in general morally prohibited. It will be argued that this attitude is logically incompatible with a simultaneous commitment to non-discrimination against persons with disabilities, in that the Act makes allowance for the subjection of beings that are considered to be morally significant, but that exhibit disabling characteristics, to worse treatment than their non-disabled counterparts, despite the fact that this differential treatment is not always justified by the presence of impairment.