Had a great conversation with a wise woman today. This woman, 60-something , mother, grandmother, believer in the true strength of women, was talking to me about how things were “back in the day.” We were touching on a variety of topics when, suddenly she paused and looked to the ceiling, as if something were written there.
She started again, “Why is it that we don’t see much of this anymore? You know, all sorts of different people. I went to school with a girl who had a hunched back. And another who’s legs were not the same length. She had to wear a special shoe with a platform.
“There was a family that lived two doors down, and the father’d had his legs amputated. (I thought twins lived there, one tall and the other short. I was no older than 4. I couldn’t understand that sometimes he was wearing his prosthetic legs and sometimes he would walk around without them.) Well, that family had a daughter, and she was missing that bone between the knee and the ankle. She was older than me, so I never played with her.
“There was also a boy who would come to our house from time to time. He had Down Sydrome. He would come over with a man who worked with my father.
“And I can clearly remember, as a child, that none of these people were strange to me, or odd. They were just people, like you or I, who simply had something particular about them. But they were all around.
“Why don’t we see much of them anymore?”
“Well,” I started, “aside from some of the medical advances, many of these conditions are diagnosed during pregnancy. Children with abnormalities are usually aborted.” At this point, my eyes began to well up and I stopped speaking.
The wise woman sat back in her chair, as if soaking in the reality of what I had just said. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. She took a breath, exhaled, and stated, “That’s the problem with this generation.” She had my full attention. “You can go to the store and buy a fridge. For $100 more you can get a warranty. Why risk it? Get the warranty! But people view their children in the same way; like so many commodities. A man and a woman don’t get together and have a baby to create a family unit.” She lifted her arms, as though tightly holding a large ball to her chest. “They should love the family enough that, when they find out the baby is less than perfect, it’s OK. It’s still their baby. It’s still their family.”
by 
Now that I think about it, I think all the mentally retarded people I’ve seen personally (as in, not on TV or pictures) have been adults. I’m trying to remember ever encountering a mentally retarded child and I don’t think I have.
There used to be this man named Tom who went to my church. He was mentally retarded and he’d pass out any programs at the door. He was one of the most polite people I’ve ever met; he always told my mother and me that we looked nice, and once when my dad and I were looking for something he took the time to show us where it was and make sure we didn’t need help with anything else. Sometimes I’d see him at the grocery store, where he had a job stocking the shelves. I think his family moved (he lived with his parents), but he was sort of like a fixture of my childhood. I don’t think anyone ever specifically told me that he was mentally retarded, I just sort of picked up that he was different from the other adults and then when I got older and found out about mental retardation I realized that was what he had.
My mom had one doctor for most of her pregnancy (with me – I’m an only child), but then he moved to a different state about two months before I was born and she had to get a different doctor. To this day, if anything about amniocentesis is raised in conversation, she gets irritated thinking about how the second doctor kept trying to get her got get one. Then she tells me, “It had a risk of miscarriage that came with it, and the only benefit of it was finding out if you were mentally retarded, and if you had been mentally retarded we weren’t going to abort you so it was pointless!” I get the impression the second doctor thought finding out if your baby was retarded so you could abort him/her if you wanted to was a routine part of modern pregnancy.
One thing that I noticed when I moved to the city from a small farming town was that no one was missing limbs. When you grow up on a farm, you become quite accustomed to the people who walk around town without fingers, arms, or, occasionally, legs. There’s no sinister reason for that, except that workplace safety is much better in the city than on the farm.
I don’t think that you can blame abortion for the fact that there are fewer people with disabilities nowadays. You can blame abortion for the non-existence of people with certain disabilities such as Down’s syndrome or other chromosomal anomalies, or other, well-defined, genetic diseases, but disabilities in general, no.
Better understanding of prenatal nutrition means that fewer children develop neural tube and other birth defects. Better prenatal care means that fewer complications arise during pregnancy and birth. Fewer complications during pregnancy and birth mean far less instance of cerebral palsy.
The girl who sat behind me in my high school English class had had a cleft palate repaired. She was made fun of: she had an obvious scar. My cousin had a baby with a cleft palate this February. The doctor at Toronto’s Sick Kids assures her that when they are done with him, nobody will even be able to tell.
But I think the most obvious reason that a sixty-something year old woman would remember all kinds of disabled people as a child was that a polio epidemic swept through North America sixty to seventy years ago. I haven’t heard of a case of polio for ages (thank God for vaccines), let alone a case that left someone crippled.
I guess my point is that, when you spend so much time in the pro-life blogosphere, you tend to focus on the people who view life as disposable. I don’t deny that those people exist, and that there numbers are growing stronger. But really, the reason that you see far fewer cripples these days is not that people are aborting them. It’s that we can do far more to help them.
And (because I need to say it) I know that Universal Health Care has its problems. But I’m proud to live in a country where no family needs to go without in order to pay for medical care for a child with serious health problems.
From the site, http://www.abortionincanada.ca (note that statistics are not available until several years after – hence these are 2004)
“Of 100,039 abortions performed on Canadian women in Canada in 2004, detailed records on gestational age exist for only 39,874. The age of the fetus at the time of abortion is not known for the remaining 63,165 abortions. Most of the abortions with detailed records were performed in hospitals. Only the province of Alberta provided detailed records for 6,125 clinic abortions.
Of those 39,874 abortions with gestational age recorded, 35 were performed when the unborn child was 25 weeks gestation or older. Five were performed at more than 33 weeks. Twelve were done at 29-32 weeks, 18 at 25-28 weeks, and 366 were performed between 21-24 weeks gestation. A total of 401 abortions took place when the unborn baby was more than 20 weeks gestation, able to feel pain and survive outside the womb.
By trimester: 31,994 were performed in the first three months, 4,845 during the second trimester and 35 in the third trimester of pregnancy.”
I have heard the figure for the Isaac Walton Killam Hospital here in Halifax, that 68 abortions were performed there last year. Most abortions are done at the Victoria General Hospital, only those that are called “fetal anomalies” are done at the IWK. Therefore one can assume that those 68 were in fact babies with disabilities, babies not expected to survive, babies with congenital problems, Downs syndrome, etc.
It seems to me that 68 abortions on the grounds of disabilities is a lot in a small province like Nova Scotia.
To Melissa
I worked in a prenatal diagnosis lab in a major hospital in southern Ontario, and I witnessed parents decide to terminate otherwise normal babies, once an ultrasound detected a physical abnormality. Let me assure you that there is still a significant number of babies in Canada who are aborted merely because they are missing limbs (sometimes the “deformity” is as little as a missing finger, or an extra one!) or have a cleft palate, etc.
The standard use of ultrasounds during pregnancy has allowed our medical personnel to detect a vast number of physical abnormalities in utero. And make no mistake – When faced with what they see as their “choice”, there really are Canadian parents out there who choose to scrap this one and try again – for the “perfect” child.
The reason we observe far fewer people with disabilities these days undoubtedly has many contributing factors. But do not delude yourself into thinking that abortion is not a significant contributor to this decrease. At least in Canada, I can attest that some parents do abort babies merely on the basis of disability. And the doctors I worked with considered this a normal and appropriate response. 🙁
How sad and cruel! I knew a girl who had been born either a missing finger or an extra finger. I don’t remember, and I didn’t even notice until she mentioned that her typing teacher was going to figure out a special technique for her.
It is terrible the way that people fear society so much, that they assume that anyone who is a little “different” is better off dead.
I went to school with Down Syndrome children who had special classes of their own. Some were picked on, but some were deeply respected. Come to think of it, this was also the dynamic of children without Down Syndrome. It helped the Down Syndrome kids, as it helped other kids, to have a less vulnerable sibling at school.