Seen any Down's kids lately?

I know it's awful of me to keep copying and pasting from this one blog, but she says things that are So Important, I can't help but NEED to pass them along to anyone reading this.
When she mentions the vile comments about the disabled, she means really vile. Go over and check the sources, because people have reverted back to calling the disabled "retards" and much, much worse. They say some amazingly mean things. They do this to large families, too, in case anyone was wondering.
When did people get quite so rude?

And All Unkindness

Christopher NOlan, poet, author, and wheelchair bound victim of Cerebral Palsy so severe he communicates only via keyboard writes of himself:

'A brain-damaged baby cannot ponder why a mother cannot communicate with it, and unless it gains parental love and stimulation it stymies, and thus retardation fulsomely establishes its soul-destroying seabed.' Conscious of the breathtaking sacrifice involved in what his family did for him, yet he detected where destiny beckoned. The future for babies like him never looked more promising, but now society frowned upon giving spastic babies a right to life. Now they threatened to abort babies like him, to detect in advance their handicapped state, to burrow through the womb and label them for death, to baffle their mothers with fear for their coming, and yet, the spastic baby would ever be the soul which would never kill, maim, creed falsehood or hate brotherhood. Why then does society fear the crippled child...and why does it hail the able-bodied child and crow over what may in time become a potential executioner?



Elsewhere in his writings young Christopher marvels at the age he lives in, recognizing that a hundred years ago a child like him would have been trapped in himself, unable to communicate beyond a rudimentary level with even the most doting of parents. He would scarcely have survived his childhood, and he certainly wouldn't have published a book, spent any time in the public eye, or given national awards. The western cultural attitude towards disability is disturbing, especially given the technological advances that give the disabled lives they didn't even survive to dream about in previous centuries.

Tarranto looks at comments about baby Trig Palin made by Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, Cintra Wilson at Salon, and South Carolina Democratic chairwoman Carol Fowler (wife of the guy who was chuckling about the hurricane due to strike New Orleans as evidence that God was on the Democrats' side) and concludes:

This is worse than tasteless or even unhinged. It is depraved. It represents an inversion of any reasonable conception of right and wrong, including liberal conceptions.

Fowler uses Palin's motherhood to disparage her accomplishments, an obvious betrayal of the principle of women's equality. And although proponents of permissive abortion laws nearly always claim to support not abortion but "a woman's right to choose," here we have three of them rebuking Palin for choosing not to abort her baby.


It is disgusting, and of course, in the less careful swampy regions of Kos, the comments are even worse. As the mother of a disabled child I am alternately outraged and sickened by what I am reading. I know, and am grateful to know, that there are certainly people who consider themselves far to the left of me who would likewise be sickened and outraged by such vile bigotry against the disabled and those who cherish their disabled family members. But that doesn't make this sort of bitter bile against people like my child any more palatable or acceptable.

Right to Life groups have been pointing out the 'right to die' and the right to kill all to easily become an obligation to die, an obligation to kill those that make society uncomfortable, and that's what we are seeing revealed in this nasty, putrid comments.

From a post I wrote two years ago called 'The Disappearance of the Disabled' where I noticed that at a large group of conservative Christian homeschoolers, I noticed several disabled children, more than you would usually see in a similar sized group of families, and I realized why that is when:

I read this post, Eradicating the Disabled, about an article called "The Abortion Debate No One Wants to Have." The author of the original article is the mother of a child with Down Syndrome. She notes,

"today nearly all children diagnosed in utero with Down's syndrome are
aborted---upwards of 90 percent. Moreover, she senses that the "right" to abort
has become, increasingly, regarded as a social and moral duty. She recounts
hearing a "director of an Ivy League ethics program," who stated "that
prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo prenatal testing and to
terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth a child with a disability,
because it was immoral to subject a child to the kind of suffering he or she
would have to endure." A statement that instantly raises the
no-longer-amusing-or-hypothetical prospect of "wrongful life" litigation,
directed at mothers who "choose life." Unstated, but clearly lurking beneath the
surface, is a certain moral indignancy toward those who would presume to inflict
such children upon the rest of us."

The original author also says

"Many young women, upon meeting us, have asked whether I had "the test." I interpret the question as a get-home-free card. If I say no, they figure, that means I'm a victim of circumstance, and therefore not implicitly repudiating the decision they may make to abort if they think there are disabilities involved.
If yes, then it means I'm a right-wing antiabortion nut whose choices aren't relevant to their lives. "

This does not happen to us every day, every month, or even every year, but I have been asked some unbelievably rude questions by total strangers. People meet our Cherub and ask questions like, "Were you tested? Why did you have more children after she was born? Weren't you afraid you'd bring another handicapped child into the world? Is what's wrong with her genetic? " I know I am not the only mother of a disabled child to whom some idiot has casually commented, "hmm, too bad you didn't know she was retarded before she was born so that she could have been aborted." In our case we also have that 'get of jail free' card because, as it happens, the Cherub is adopted. I generally make people uncomfortable by replying to such questions with something like, "Well, she was adopted, so that doesn't really apply to our situation, but we believe all children are a blessing, anyway, so it wouldn't have made any difference if she had been born to us in the usual way." Yes, it makes some people uncomfortable, but some people ought to be uncomfortable at times. Sometimes it takes social discomfort to make us take a good, hard look at ourselves to make us think about who we are and what we have become.

Many, many thanks to J. Quinby for directing our attention to this link.

As he notes, he has written eloquently about this before. In that excellent post (and I really hope you will read the entire thing) he asks,

"How much further down the eugenics slope are we going to go? Is there any way back up? I am not optimistic at the moment.

How many Down's kids have you seen around lately? Not too many, I'll bet.

Ever wonder why?"

Have you? Do you care? Does it matter to you?




Update: We briefly addressed this issue before in the post titled "Treating the Disabled to Death."

Posted by Headmistress, zookeeper at 9/13/2008 02:00:00 PM 3 comments Links to this post

Labels: disabilities, Pro-life