Cleft Palate Controversy

In today’s world, it is all too common for women to elect abortion in cases of “imperfect babies.” It is an ethical disaster affecting the entire world. A European monitoring project reported that “abortions are being performed even though the conditions can be corrected surgically after birth” such as cleft palates and club foot (Beezy, 2013). Cleft lip and cleft palate are developmental anomalies that occur during embryonic development in which there is an incomplete fusion (Huether & McCance, 2012, p 938). In most cases, these defects are strongly related to environment interactions such as vitamin B deficiency, maternal alcohol and tobacco use (Huether & McCance, 2012, p 938). Being that the mother has control over some of these environmental factors, experts are finding that doctors are covering up the terminations to avoid controversy and scrutiny (Beezy, 2013). This lunacy has presented another arising ethical issue which disguises how many abortions are really being performed for such anomalies. …show more content…
The data collected by Eurocat, a European network of registers for congenital anomalies, revealed that between 2006 and 2010, 157 fetal lives were abolished due to cleft lip and palate diagnoses in England and Wales alone (Beezy, 2013). Another 205 lives were lost in the same regard due to a club foot diagnosis (Beezy, 2013). Club foot is another congenital defect that “describes a range of foot deformities in which the foot turns inward and downward” and can often be corrected with surgery once the baby is born (Huether & McCance, 2012). What is truly alarming and horrific is that in 2010, 886 fetuses diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome were aborted, almost double from the year prior (Beezy, 2013). These statistics are disturbing and heartbreaking, notably considering how many cases go unreported. Even one life in this study is too many especially for an established