March 4, 2006--"Life as an alternative"

 

Back in December I cut out a newspaper article in order to blog about it, but hadn't done it yet. Now I came across the article (while trying to pack--we leave for the U.S. in...44 1/2 hours) again, so will write about it quickly: it's about the very rare occasion when a German mother chooses not to kill her baby before birth, even though the baby has been diagnosed with Down's Syndrome.

95% of parents who are told that their unborn baby has Down's Syndrome choose an abortion, which is legal as long as the baby hasn't been born yet. That's 19 out of 20. That means that for each person with Down's Syndrome that one sees, there are 19 others that age that should also be running around, but were killed.

I know one nine-year-old boy here with Down's Syndrome, and his mother was thrilled to find out that I have an uncle with Down's Syndrome, because she finds so few people that have any understanding at all. For nearly ten years, the main sympathy she's received has been along the lines of "Oh, that must have been such a shock when he was born!" Then when people find out that she knew BEFORE he was born, they just don't understand why she went ahead and had the baby, and tell her so, to her face, and in front of her son.

In all fairness, the article is actually about how there is a lot of criticism about the high abortion rate, and Down's Syndrome is given as an example of why a child should NOT be killed. There's a lobby to limit abortions, which is positive (of course, better would be to eliminate them completely), but the really awful thing is why this lobby got started: because of Tim.

Tim was actually aborted in summer 1997 (shortly before my own first child was born), because of Down's Syndrome. He survived, so the confused doctors wrapped him in some towels and left him to die. Nine hours later, he was still alive, so they finally gave him medical treatment. In addition to the Down's Syndrome, he has permanent brain, lung, and eye damage due to not having had any care for the first nine hours after his birth. Tim is now 8 and lives with a foster family that loves him, but will always be severly disabled--not because of Down's Syndrome, but because of the circumstances of his birth.

The result of this case, however, has NOT been to lower the abortion rate, but to insist that before a baby is aborted, he or she should first be killed by lethal injection. Many doctors are refusing to do this, however, and so finally (eight years later), some people are starting to say, "Hmm...maybe the baby shouldn't be killed at all!"