ack..I was trying to post this in the abortion forum. Sorry for the double post.
pro-life ping
ping to address
Thank you for posting this. It gives me the opportunity to post one of my favorite writings. It was written by the mother of child with downs syndrome, but really is applicable to any family with a disabled child:
WELCOME TO HOLLAND
by Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this...
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome To Holland”.
“Holland?!?” you say, “What do you mean “Holland”??? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills...Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy...and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned”.
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very significant loss.
But...if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things...about Holland.
© 1987, by Emily Perl Kingsley. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission of the author.
ping.
I’m grateful every day that I was born into a pro-life family. When my mother went in for some screening her obstetrician suggested, the idiot technician said that I probably had severe Down’s (can you even tell the severity from one of those tests?) and suggested she get an abortion.
Fortunately she refused, and some months later I was born completely healthy.
We have a 9 year old son named Lance. And yes he does have Down Syndrome! When we found out in Yuma,Az, we were very heavly pressured to abort him from my wife’s Dr. But we had talked about it and had decided yearly in our marriage[we started our family late in life] that if we had a child with a handicap that we would raise them as best we could.
Anyway Lance is a high speed,low drag, high maintence kid. I need jet powered roller blades just to keep up with that child. He loves to run [may end up being a high school cross country runner] all over our 5 acres of property and I need to use my 3 wheeler to round him up at the end of the day. He is also Dad’s little buddy. Whereever I go he has to be there and help me [whether I need it or not! lol :) ] So when we run across the folks who say that there should be a choice, we show Lance and say here is our choice, a bright and very loving little boy!
I can’t find them on the list. Any suggestions?
Okay, I think I found it. Awareness Can Build A Family. That’s the headline it was under. I voted! :o) God Bless you and your family!
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Sad. Hitler and Darwin at work. I’ve known a fair number of children and adults with Downs Syndrome, and they were all wonderful, happy people who were a joy to their parents. It’s as if God compensates for the mental lack with other strengths.