I found this in my local paper yesterday and was glad to find a copy of it on line via the Washington Post. Mr. Gerson makes an excellent point! Last week when the Palin family came under scrutiny, it was even suggested by some in the drive by media that Sarah Palin wasn’t a good mom because she obviously didn’t have good prenatal care – because of course, if she had had good prenatal care she would have learned that her baby was not “normal” and she would have had an abortion.
On the Firestone Swim Team there was a young man with Down’s Syndrome who actually went to China to participate in the Special Olympics. He is somewhat of a celebrity here. We have lots of services in our community for kids with special needs for mental retardation and Downs Syndrome. But with fewer and fewer of those children being allowed to live I wonder if it seeing a Down’s syndrome kid will become extremely rare over the next 20 years.
I think in some corners of the country it must have been a bit of a jolt to see little Trig acting pretty much like any other baby, being loved and held pretty much like any baby, and having a mama so bursting with pride with love for him, pretty much like any other baby!
If Palin makes it to Vice President, I think the country may continue to be surprised and delighted at watching little Trig grow up. And maybe that will dispel some of the horror stories young women are given by their nay sayer health care providers every day in this country.
- Michael Gerson – Trig’s Breakthrough – washingtonpost.com
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In addition to Barack Obama making history as the first African American to be nominated for president and Sarah Palin taking her shotgun to the glass ceiling, there was a third civil rights barrier broken at the political conventions this yea
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It was not always this way. John F. Kennedy‘s younger sister Rosemary, who was born in 1918, had a mental disability that was treated as a family secret. For decades Rosemary was hidden as a "childhood victim of spinal meningitis." Joseph Kennedy subjected his daughter to a destructive lobotomy when she was 23. It was the remarkable Eunice Kennedy Shriver who talked openly of her sister’s condition in 1962 and went on to found the Special Olympics as a summer camp in her back yard — part of a great social movement of compassion and inclusion.
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Trig’s moment in the spotlight is a milestone of that movement. But it comes at a paradoxical time. Unlike what is accorded African Americans and women, civil rights protections for people with Down syndrome have rapidly eroded over the past few decades. Of the cases of Down syndrome diagnosed by prenatal testing each year, about 90 percent are eliminated by abortion. Last year the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended universal, early testing for Down syndrome — not just for older pregnant women. Some expect this increased screening to reduce the number of Down syndrome births to something far lower than the 5,500 we see today, perhaps to fewer than 1,000.
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But children born with Down syndrome — who learn slowly but love deeply — are generally not experienced by their parents as a curse but as a complex blessing. And when allowed to survive, men and women with an extra chromosome experience themselves as people with abilities, limits and rights. Yet when Down syndrome is detected through testing, many parents report that genetic counselors and physicians emphasize the difficulties of raising a child with a disability and urge abortion.
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Yet the pro-choice radicalism held by Kennedy and many others — the absolute elevation of individual autonomy over the rights of the weak — has enabled the new eugenics. It has also created a moral conflict at the heart of the Democratic Party. If traditional Democratic ideology means anything, it is the assertion that America is a single moral community that includes everyone. How can this vision possibly be reconciled with the elimination of children with Down syndrome from American society? Are pro-choice Democrats really comfortable with this choice?
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