There are several but here is one ....
Posted on 03/09/2006 5:38:33 PM PST by NYer
MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota, MARCH 9, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Many prospective parents are waiting for years to adopt children with Down syndrome, according to a recent article in the Associated Press.
So why is there an extended wait for kids with special needs, who are usually more difficult to place with families? The reason might be: the growing acceptance of aborting babies with Down syndrome.
Elizabeth Schiltz, law professor at the University of St. Thomas and contributor to "The Cost of 'Choice': Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion" (Encounter Books), shared with ZENIT how aborting children with Down syndrome has not only become justified, but is almost considered a duty.
Schiltz also relayed her experience in receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome for her son.
Q: Why do you think it has become socially acceptable to abort a child with Down syndrome?
Schiltz: Because, unfortunately, it has become socially acceptable to abort any baby who disappoints the expectations of the baby's parents for any reason, as the increasingly common practice of sex-selection abortion indicates.
Down syndrome just happens to be a disability that is easily identified through prenatal testing.
Not only have many come to accept that a woman faced with such news is justified in aborting her child, some now go further and insist that she has a duty to abort.
Bob Edwards, the scientist who created Great Britain's first in vitro fertilization baby, gave a speech a couple of years ago at an international fertility conference in which he said, "Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease. We are entering a world where we have to consider the quality of our children."
This is frightening. It signals an erosion of societal consensus about our collective responsibility for vulnerable people.
Society will increasingly believe that a mother who forgoes an easy abortion and chooses instead to give birth to a disabled child should not look to the community for help. After all, it was her "choice."
Q: Has prenatal testing contributed to the problem?
Schiltz: Prenatal testing has made the population of children with Down syndrome more vulnerable to abortion, because it's so easy to identify them. But the real problem isn't the testing.
The real problem is using the results of these tests as part of a crude "cost-benefit" analysis -- of balancing the "benefit" of giving birth to a child with Down syndrome against the "cost" to the mother and the broader society.
Obviously, such a cost-benefit analysis ignores the fundamental truth that every human is created in the image and likeness of God.
And, even on its own utilitarian terms, this analysis is often faulty because it rarely involves adequate information about the realities of living with Down syndrome -- either for the baby or the baby's family.
Brian Skotko, a Harvard Medical School student, published a pair of studies in the medical journals Pediatrics and the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology just last year, concluding that few mothers were satisfied with the manner in which their doctors delivered pre- or post-natal diagnoses of Down syndrome, or the information provided by their doctors when they gave these diagnoses.
I applaud efforts like the bill introduced in Congress last year by Senators Brownback and Kennedy, called the Prenatally Diagnosed Condition Awareness Act, that would require healthcare providers to provide up-to-date, scientific information about prenatally diagnosed conditions and referrals to support services.
I'd like them to amend the bill to add information about the waiting lists for adoption of kids with Down syndrome.
Q: The Associated Press recently reported that many families are choosing to adopt children with Down syndrome and sometimes have to wait years. What are your thoughts on this phenomenon?
Schiltz: I am thrilled that this has finally caught the attention of the mainstream press. The newsletters and Internet listservs of Down syndrome support groups have been talking about this for years.
In fact, I know a woman who runs an adoption agency, Huminska's Anioly, that specializes in placing children from Polish orphanages in homes in the United States.
When she heard about the waiting lists at American adoption agencies for children with Down syndrome a couple of years ago, she started a special program for children in Polish orphanages with Down syndrome.
In the States, there's another resource: the Adoption Awareness Program -- Down Syndrome Association of Greater Cincinnati.
Q: What was your experience in receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome for your child?
Schiltz: I think my experience of receiving the prenatal diagnosis for my son was somewhat atypical, because my doctors knew that abortion was not an option for me. Even so, three things about the process were really striking.
First, there is a phenomenal amount of pressure to make decisions quickly, because the whole system is geared to result in earlier and therefore "safer" abortions. The pressure to act quickly in these situations not only increases risk to the baby, but I think it must often prevent parents from thinking through realistic alternatives to abortion.
Second, I was struck by how little positive information about life with Down syndrome the doctors and genetic counselors were able to provide me. Although my doctor was very supportive of my decision, neither she nor our genetic counselor had any helpful information to share about life with Down syndrome.
Third, even though I was pro-life, and even though I spent my whole life loving my mentally retarded older brother, getting the actual diagnosis was extremely traumatic.
For days afterward, I hesitated to put my hands on my belly. I felt as though a stranger had moved in, and he frightened me. For weeks afterward, I felt as though I had lost my entire identity.
I had never perceived of myself as a person with a child with a disability. I had always perceived of myself as a person with "perfect" children. I didn't know how I could continue with the life I had always planned for myself.
But, gradually, I started to love that little "stranger" just as strongly as I loved the old vision of what he would be. And, gradually, I realized that my old self was still there, it just had some new things to learn.
Personally, I'm glad that I was able to go through that trauma before my child was born. But it's important to be sensitive to how devastating this kind of news can be to any parent.
Q: How are people with Down syndrome an important and special part of our society?
Schiltz: In her book, "The Child Who Never Grew," Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author Pearl S. Buck wrote this about her mentally retarded daughter: "[B]y this most sorrowful way I was compelled to tread, I learned respect for reverence for every human mind.
"It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly that all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights. None is to be considered less, as a human being, than any other, and each must be given his place and his safety in the world.
"I might never have learned this in any other way. I might have gone on in the arrogance of my own intolerance for those less able than myself. My child taught me humanity."
In addition to teaching me about humanity, I also think that my son has taught me something about divinity. I think my love for him sometimes provides a hint of what God's love for us must be like.
Like my love for my son, God's love for us doesn't depend on our intellect, our accomplishments or our proximity to what society defines as "success."
People with Down syndrome wear their vulnerability on their faces. They are a visible reminder that the image of God reflected in humanity includes people of all sorts of intellectual capacities.
It would be an impoverished society indeed that succeeded in eliminating such powerful teachers of both humanity and divinity.
My friend has a daughter that is slightly mentally retarded and she is the same way.
If I was able to find out if my kids had the gene while I was pregnant would I have considered abortion? Never.
Just because life's tougher for me than for most doesn't mean it's not worth fighting for.
My son has unstable Type 1 diabetes and Celiac disease. Dealing with him is exhausting. I've gone 2.5 years with sleep deprivation and it has aged me. And I'm dealing with my own disability.
No. Caring for a disabled child is not all sweetness and light. I wouldn't even say that it's 10% sweetness and light. It's tough. It's heartbreaking. It's frustrating. It's exhausting. The times you can relax and have a "sweetness and light" kind of moment, you usually feel yourself folding into grief for your child instead.
But it's the ultimate act of love and sacrifice. I'd do it all again if I had to. Every time I hit the end of my rope I look at him and I find strength. I've discovered that I'm capable of more than I'd ever thought possible. It's made me into a stronger, wiser, more serious human being. It's the hardest school I've ever been to and I'm proud to know that I will graduate.
Those who had Downs Syndrome that I met happend to be some of the smartest human souls I've ever met. Not to mention of course gentle, sweet and beautiful.
Yes and no. I've met people with Down's Syndrome with adult foibles. They aren't all angelic children. In fact, I don't really like people treating them as perpetual children. They are capable of more than that. They stay children mostly because they are socialized that way.
Because, as we all know, the products of conception by rape are simply little lumps of innocuous tissue, not proper babies at all...
Did they diagnose Down's or did her Triple Screen come back as indicitive of Down's? I contemplated not getting the Triple Screen test at all because they are so unreliable - too many false positives. In the end, I went through with it and the tests came back fine.
BTW, congrats on your great-grand baby. Our first daughter is due to join us in about 5 weeks.
My neighbor had a baby girl with mosaic Downs two years ago. The Downs was not diagnosed before her birth. My neighbor was terribly upset that the Downs wasn't diagnosed in time for her to abort the baby.
The wretched irony in this story is that this woman is a special needs teacher who works with Downs children herself! I gently pointed out to her that that made her very qualified to mother a Down's child. She didn't like it at the time, but I gather she doesn't harbor too many feeling of anger toward me since she is still speaking to me!
I'll bet she is a better teacher too.
Congratulations on the upcoming birth of your daughter.
Here's my personal observation on raising the two genders (having had both):
Girls are easier to raise after about age 18, boys anywhere from 25 to 30. Non live in grand children of both genders are the easiest of all.
Thank you for both the compliment and the correction of the song title; the latter has been updated on my home page.
Who is this? I would love to hear her testimony! Rape is the one thing that I have had feelings both ways about the rightness and the wrongness of an abortion in this situation. As a Catholic, I believe that there must be a reason for this person, but it seems like the child was conceived through the most awful of circumstances. It would be a blessing to hear what this woman has to say.
You are most welcome. Somewhere, someone in We Five is thanking you. I've got troubles, whoa oh whoa....
At least in this day and age, I don't think anybody is aborting pregnancies based just on the first-round test for Downs (nuchal scan). That's an unreliable test and is just used to identify whether there's a significant likelihood that the fetus has Downs. If the parents aren't going to abort for Downs anyway, then there's no reason to do the additional genetic testing to confirm it (though some parents do anyway, just because they want to know and maybe tell relatives in advance). The confirming tests, chorionic villi sampling and amniocentesis, carry some risk, but very small. Any doctor who advised a patient to abort based on a nuchal scan alone, would be betting their career on the accuracy of that notoriously inaccurate test, because if the aborted fetus turned out not to have Downs, the malpractice suit would be so open-and-shut that the insurer wouldn't even bother trying to defend it -- they'd just pay out several million and leave the doctor uninsurable for the rest of his life.
There are several but here is one ....
But they don't stay cute little kids, so that's not a good basis for deciding to have one. Medical advances have resulted in most of them living to middle age, albeit with quite of lot of medical support. Some parents think ahead to the future and decide it's better not to have a mentally and physically disabled child who will probably outlive them, and almost certainly outlive their ability to provide the care that a Downs syndrome adult needs during the latter years of a disease-shortened life.
I know someone who chose not to do testing for Downs syndrome with her first pregnancy (which was IVF, so could have been tested before the embryos were even transferred into her), because she and her husband had decided they would go ahead and have a Downs baby. Fast-forward to 4 years later, and she's now trying for another baby. This time she and her husband decided, based on their age and the existing child, that they did not want to risk a Downs baby this time, and so will do preimplantation genetic diagnosis. They feel it's irresponsible to take a high risk that their daughter will end up saddled with the dual strain of dealing with infirm elderly parents and a Downs sibling, while she's still very young herself, and later having sole responsibility for the Downs sibling, who would likely be in the process of dying while the daughter has young children of her own.
So not everyone who decides not to have a Downs baby just assumes that Downs automatically means a life not worth living. Some people balance the whole picture and decide that in their own particular situation, they shouldn't bring another Downs person into the world.
Very true. I used to teach gymnastics classes, and had several Downs children, most of whom were always sweet and cooperative. But one was the total opposite, and my best guess was that it was because she was on the very high-functioning end of the Downs spectrum. She knew she was different, and she was NOT happy about it. Trying to get her to put her clothes and shoes on after class, to get ready to leave, was a nightmare -- she kicked me in the shins more than once. And it wasn't like she didn't want to leave because she'd been having so much fun; she was just as difficult to deal with during class. Her poor mother always looked so utterly miserable, that I couldn't bring myself to ask her to come into the gym at the end of class, and help deal with getting her daughter dressed.
Nope. They will just try to make doing the test a felony hate crime. Problem solved.
With the increasing ease of genetic paternity testing that does not involve taking blood (can be done with hair samples or swabbing the mouth, the UK, for example has forbidden the practice without the mother's consent
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