Another article about disappearing Down Syndrome children. The author describes how his friend had a baby born with Downs and
once the dust settled it became clear that, despite the bleakness of the diagnosis, she was still a very proud, very committed, and very loving mother to a tremendous and joyful young child. …She even embraces the idea of having another child with Down syndrome.
He goes on to say this:
As current evidence would suggest, my friend is in the ideological minority.
And if he’s commenting on having Downs children, then yes, stats suggest most are aborted and keeping a Downs baby puts a woman in the minority.
But if he’s commenting on a mother embracing her child, even with a diagnosis of Downs then I’d hazard to say she’s in the majority.
It’s the abortion choice that robs a mother of the chance to love and embrace her child, no matter the difficulty. Which I think, once the initial shock is over, is the way things go. It’s getting there in face of this culture that devalues “imperfect” life that is the hard part.
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I keep wondering what the big deal is with Down Syndrome that people feel that they have to abort their child. There is no guarantee that the “normal” child that one gives birth to is going to remain that way for the remainder of his/her life. What happens if they have a debilitating accident resulting in them having physical or mental challenges, develop a chronic illness, or simply make bad choices in their lives, making parenting them something less than a rosy experience? The children I have met and worked with who have Down Syndrome are some of the most delightful, spirited, hardworking I have met in my life. Sure it isn’t easy raising these children, and some have serious health issues, but for crying out loud, who ever said that parenting any child is going to be easy? We are a society that is so afraid of difficulty and suffering at any cost, it’s frightening.
I think the big deal with Down’s syndrome, Suzanne, is that it is detectable before birth. I once worked with a biology teacher whose wife had undergone prenatal testing for the express purpose of aborting if the results were less than perfect. I said to him, “What would be so bad about having a child with Down’s Syndrome? It would certainly be easier than having a child with autism.”
He said to me “Yeah, but there is no test to detect autism.”
Come to think of it, my high school biology teacher had twins in her early forties. One of the twins ended up with some genetic disorder. (I forget what it’s called, but is the one where he couldn’t properly process one of the amino acids.) They didn’t catch it in time, and he ended up with brain damage. I ran into her at a party three years later, and overheard a conversation in which she was near tears, lamenting the fact that he was disabled, because “there should be some guarantee of a healthy child.”
I felt bad for her, but thought it odd that she thought there would be some guarantee of a healthy child. I later found out from another source that she had undergone prenatal screening.
These were both high school biology teachers. These are who are teaching our children.
We really need to impress upon people that this pre-natal testing is no different than the eugenics we condemned when done by Nazis. We are just getting better at doing it earlier. Same thing though, we discriminate against people on the basis of failing a physical test for what we consider desirable.
Not just teachers reaching our children with their beliefs, but nurses and doctors being educated by those whose ethics are deficient.
A nursing student told me that one week, her ethics prof told the class that fetuses have no rights in Canada and the class was appalled. Next week, same prof stated that the woman’s right was primary and she could do with her body what she wished. No questions from the students, they simply accepted what they were told. They shift with the wind, same thing with med students. And yet, these are the people we trust to make moral judgments. We need to realise that they are not in any way qualified to make those judgments.
Minor nitpicking… technicly it isn’t eugenics unless you are trying to get rid of an undesireable inherited trait, or promote a good one. Downs is neither, as sufferers tend not to breed. Similar, yes. But not quite the same.
The nazis wern’t even very good at eugenics – they let their scientific judgement become clouded by politics and racism.
“I ran into her at a party three years later, and overheard a conversation in which she was near tears, lamenting the fact that he was disabled, because “there should be some guarantee of a healthy child.””
Well yes, in a perfect world, there would be guarantees that we’d all have healthy children – and also that they would stay healthy throughout their lives, and that we and our siblings and spouses and parents should live to old age, in robust health, and then die peacefully in their sleep. That’s not how it works, though – and our challenge, when we, or our loved ones, or most of all our children, are afflicted, is to persevere, and grow, and cherish life in whatever form it takes, for as long as we can.
Sarah Palin described how she felt learning her unborn son had Down’s Syndrome, while her husband was away, and waiting until his return to tell him in person, and saying, “why us?” And her husband replied, “why not us?” There is a great deal of faith and grace in that worldview. I hope never to be tested that way, but if I am, I hope to bear it the way they and so many others do.