The assertion of certain conservative politicians that abortion should not be considered “essential” surgery in a time of medical shortages is the latest twist in the ever-active “pro-life” news agenda. But different sorts of life debates lie ahead.

Writers on religion and ethics went to work when Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick suggested on Fox News that it’s OK if senior citizens like himself need to die in this epidemic to ensure that their children and grandchildren have decent economic livelihoods. Radio talker Glenn Beck, a Latter-day Saint, agreed that he’d “rather die than kill the country.”

Even liberals who favor fully free choice for abortion and mercy-killing abhorred suggestions that incomes should count more than the sacredness of human life. Harvard’s Ashish Jha told The Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey that Patrick set up “a false dichotomy” between economics and public health, which is “possibly the dumbest debate we’re having.”

A related topic could be around the corner that journalists should be preparing to cover. In a word: Triage.

Here’s the Merriam-Webster definition: “The sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors.”

That is, in a crunch who gets life-saving treatment and who doesn’t? In the current crisis, what if intensive care units in a city’s hospitals run short of ventilators necessary to sustain life, as worst-case projections indicate could happen? Should advanced age be a criterion for withholding treatments? This is a nation that next January will inaugurate a president of age 74 (Donald Trump) or 78 (Joe Biden) or 79 (Bernie Sanders), alongside a likely House Speaker who is 80.

Not long ago, I was at a picnic with a family whose youngest daughter has Down Syndrome. The child never stopped moving and she had a predilection for (1) Running into the street and (2) Finding the nearest mud puddle and getting herself as dirty as possible. Keeping her still while we ate was a fantasy.

It was impossible to talk for more than a few sentences before the child would run off. I kept on wondering: How do they do it? And knowing in many ways, they are not doing it; that the mom never gets a break except for the few hours a day when the child is in kindergarten.

There’s literature out there about the joys of a Down Syndrome kid, but the reality can be much more complex and even cruel, which is why I was interested in a story in Slate titled “Choosing Life with Down Syndrome.”

It begins with a profile of Celeste Blau, a married woman in her early 30s living in a Cleveland suburb who discovers during her pregnancy that her first child has Down syndrome (DS).

Thanks to advances in pre-natal testing, it’s pretty easy to find out whether your child has the disorder. Typically, one learns of it at about 20 weeks, when a lot of women have ultrasounds to see if they have a boy or girl.

Though not widely discussed in public, the default assumption in certain milieus is that aborting after a Down syndrome diagnosis is now the natural and obvious thing to do. Introduction to this option is, after all, a primary purpose of prenatal testing. In several recent op-eds in the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus articulated the view of the “silenced majority” of women who would have aborted a fetus with Down syndrome if prenatal tests had come back positive: “That was not the child I wanted. That was not the choice I would have made,” she wrote. “You can call me selfish, or worse, but I am in good company. The evidence is clear that most women confronted with the same unhappy alternative would make the same decision.”

The piece then goes into the numerous pieces of actual and proposed legislation now out there that makes it a crime for a woman to abort a child solely because he or she has Down Syndrome.