Amy Adams in ‘Arrival’ is a pro-life heroine for the ages

[TomSea]

Excerpted:

Amy Adams in ‘Arrival’ is a pro-life heroine for the ages

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Suddenly, Louise knows that she will have a child in the future and when she does, things will go awry. But instead of changing her fate and abstaining from motherhood, she goes ahead anyway. At the same time, the viewer realizes that the movie’s earlier scenes of Louise with her daughter are actually set in the future — and this is a tragic path she has chosen to take.

As technology gradually pulls back the veil that used to conceal the future, we become more and more obsessed with the ideal of perfect offspring.

In so doing she becomes a pro-life figure for the ages, a stand-in for all those brave mothers who give birth to children they know through prenatal testing are destined to be born with untreatable diseases. Mothers such as Amy Kuebelbeck, author of “Waiting with Gabriel,” who learned in the second trimester of her pregnancy that her son would be born with a fatal heart defect. She continued with the pregnancy, knowing her child would probably live only a few days, and as it happened he survived only a few hours. Or mothers such as Barbara Farlow, who knew her daughter Annie would be born with the lethal genetic defect trisomy 13. Annie lived for 80 days.

Louise and her real-life counterparts are exceptional women. Something like 90 percent of fetuses with Down syndrome are aborted — even though most such children will enjoy much longer lives than Louise’s child faces. Children born with Down syndrome usually are capable enough to attend their local schools, and their life expectancy is up to 60 years, or roughly the average for Americans born in 1930. When I was growing up in the 1970s, people with Down syndrome were a common sight in this country; today one rarely encounters them.

Louise’s predicament is a metaphor for our times. As technology gradually pulls back the veil that used to conceal the future, we become more and more obsessed with the ideal of perfect offspring. A corollary is increasing dissatisfaction, or even disgust with, weakness and imperfection. Other sci-fi tales, such as HBO’s “Westworld,” remind us that this growing intolerance has sinister implications. Would you abort a child knowing that he or she will be born with diabetes, a serious but manageable disorder? Isn’t classifying fetuses as unfit to be born a eugenicist point of view?

http://nypost.com/2016/11/19/amy-adams-in-arrival-is-a-pro-life-heroine-for-the-ages/