Prenatal Testing, Disability, and the Ethical Society.

This special issue of The New Bioethics follows on from a conference that took place at St Stephen’s House, University of Oxford, in March 2022, on ‘Prenatal Testing, Disability, and the Ethical Society: Reflections Following Crowter’. The conference title refers to an important decision from the High Court, R (Crowter) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care. In this case, the claimants challenged the law on abortion on the grounds of disability under the Abortion Act 1967, and their arguments raised a number of difficult ethical questions about prenatal testing, disability, and what kind of society we wish to have – and what is needed for it to be an ‘ethical society’. Heidi Crowter, the first claimant in this case, spoke at the conference, as did Máire Lea-Wilson, the second claimant and the mother of Aidan Lea-Wilson, a young boy who was the third claimant. Both Heidi Crowter and Aidan Lea-Wilson have Down syndrome, although the issues raised in the case, and in the conference, relate to disability more broadly. The conference was interdisciplinary, and featured presentations relating to the law, philosophy, theology, medical practice, and it also included testimony based on the lived experience of disabled people. Likewise, this special issue includes articles written from the perspective of different disciplines. While the wider ethical issues relating to prenatal testing for disability are not new, and have been subject to extensive analysis in the academic literature, there was an original framing of rights-based arguments in Crowter, and, even though the claim was dismissed, the claimants did succeed in the sense that they drew significant attention to important issues. This case raised the possibility for fresh insights and new avenues for discussion. Of course, it should go without saying that even if the claimants did not convince the court of their particular legal arguments, this does not mean that there are not significant and difficult ethical issues to address. It also does not mean that the law as it stands is morally justified. Perhaps one of the best ways to frame the case is through the words of Heidi Crowter herself, who expressed her motivations for challenging the law in the following manner, during the conference: ‘The reason why I wanted to go to court is