@watta*drama*queen wrote:
http://www.dailylife.com.au/life-and-love/parenting-and-families/why-i-kept-my-baby-after-finding-ou...
You discuss Bob!
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I saw and read that story the other day. Worth reading.
Jim was born 'mentally retarded'. When he was born back in 1952, the medical professionals counselled my parents to send him to live in an institution. My parents refused, and with much work and love, they taught Jim to do all those things that the medical professionals told my parents he would never do, like talk and walk. Jim graduated from high school. He is bilingual – fluent in German as well as English. He reads the newspaper everyday. Jim has held the same full-time position in the kitchen of a country club for twenty years now, and does not receive any sort of public assistance. Jim is known around our family as ‘the human jukebox’, for his uncanny ability to remember the lyrics to any song, from any era, by any artist.
I cannot remember a time when I did not know that the first targets of the Nazi’s gas chambers were people with disabilities. I cannot remember a time when I did not know that my brother Jim would probably not have been allowed to live if he had been born just ten years earlier, in the same hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, where I was later born – a former German military hospital in which my mother noticed, the first time she was there, swastikas carved in the borders along the top of the walls.
But that was years ago and far away, right? I grew up, moved to the United States for college, went to law school, then plunged into my life as an all-American working mum, practicing law and raising kids in the modern, progressive metropolis of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And then something happened to me, and my life changed, and in so many ways now, on so many days, I feel as though I am still living in the shadow of Mönchberg.
What happened was this. When I was about five months pregnant with my third child, Peter, I got a copy of this (pictured).
This is the karyotype of one of Petey’s cells that was floating in amniotic fluid extracted from my womb by a big needle during an amniocentesis. The arrow in the karyotype points out that Petey’s cells have three, rather than the usual two, copies of chromosome number 21. This indicates that he has an incurable chromosomal condition called trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, or, in the old-fashioned language of the Nazi regime, ‘mongolism’.
.............I am very frightened by the emerging attitude that if a woman exercises her ‘choice’ to have a child who can be identified in advance as ‘vulnerable’ for some reason, the woman herself bears the responsibility for dealing with that vulnerability. In other words, if the ‘cost’ of a certain life is going to be more than its ‘worth’, someone has to make up the deficit. The assumption seems to be that if you ‘choose’ to impose that cost on society by having a baby you could so easily have aborted, you should pay the price.
Elizabeth Schiltz is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
