Pro-life vid of day: Couple happy they’re “safe” from Down syndrome
by Hans Johnson
A new blood test called MaterniT21 Plus is making very early and accurate genetic screening available. While more information may be a good, this concerns many such as blogger Cassy Fiano, whose younger son Wyatt has Down Syndrome. Up to 90% of children like Wyatt are aborted.
Here on NBC’s Today a couple gets the rest of the results from their test:
Email dailyvid@jillstanek.com with your video suggestions.
[HT: Kelli]
Feb.21, 2013 12:00 pm |
Video of the day |
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
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I never did get this obsession with Downs, they are some of the happiest, jolliest, friendliest people I have ever met. I realize their are some health issues related to the sydrome but there are so many other disorders which cause so many worse problems that are not given nearly the same hatred by society at large than Downs. This isn’t excusing hatred of *anyone* born different, just confusion over why Downs get’s the top spot for seek and destroy eugenics.
My kindergartner has a friend with Downs in his class. This boy with DS is one of my son’s best friends. Why kill happy little children like that?
I don’t understand what’s wrong with being happy that your child doesn’t test positive for genetic defects. While I don’t think it is right to abort just because they have a disability, I find that there is a bit of a grey area here. Like what if the couple lacks money, what if the mother just doesn’t have the temperament to deal with a special needs child (we’ve all seen those mothers..), what if the parents work all the time, etc.
So A, it’s ok to abort kids if their moms don’t “have the temperment to deal” with them?? Are you a mom?
Are you kidding me.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being happy your child doesn’t have a genetic issue. I think it’s unfair to act like people shouldn’t wish for a healthy baby, health problems in kids with Down’s can get really expensive and stressful, not to mention they might need caretakers for their entire lives depending on how cognitively functioning they are. Some people don’t feel able to handle this. That isn’t an argument for aborting, of course, but it is understandable why people would be happy that their child won’t face these struggles.
I think that people with special needs children should have better access to affordable healthcare and family support systems. My sister’s daughter’s medical bills run up to the thousands every month and not all of that is covered, she even has great insurance.
Very poor choice of words, but in fairness, it sounded like they weren’t planning to abort if the child had Down Syndrome.
A7x: I know an older couple that was thrilled their child tested negative for Down Syndrome because they couldn’t “handle” a child with a disability. And then the child tuned out to be severely autistic. Things can happen to kids after birth as well–autism, cancer, horrific injuries. Those who feel they only want a perfect child should not become parents.
Don’t have the temperament; care is expensive; health problems with Downs; need for lifelong care…scary future, and the illusion of a secure future with a simple blood test! I think there is something wrong with all of these little “peeks under the hood”. Life is an adventure, a series of brushes with death. You don’t know who you are, or who they are, or what you’re capable of, until you’re there!
Maybe your child becomes paralyzed in an accident.
Maybe they are allergic to vaccines and have a reaction that leaves them mentally challenged.
Maybe they get an incurable disease. Lose an arm. Go blind.
Life happens.
These ‘answers’ are a wee, very tiny, aspect of what ‘living-WITH-a-genetic-condition means. I personally understand because from a DNA-perspective, Instead of HAVING a disease, I AM MY DISEASE … EVERY CELL IN MY BODY SAYS THAT I AM, … AND NEVER WILL BE ‘HEALTHY’ …. never mind perfect.
PLEASE, TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE EXTREME ISOLATION I FEEL AS A ‘LESS-THAN’. It doesn’t help either, when people who are trolls get response, I get zip. I often wonder: ‘Am I such a pain? Can PL afford to continue to ignore what I say? Do they want me to leave?’
Well said, Jamie!
Unfortunately, too many parents don’t want to bother to find out “what they’re capable of” and abort their babies. :(
I remembering being 14 and watching a video on Eastern European orphanages from the Cold War period, all those beautiful little kids, sitting, dead eyed in the same barred cribs they had been in since infancy, wumming back and forth, hitting their heads against the bars and shrieking whenever anyone came near. Insane, in most cases permanently, because they were never touched as infants, just left on their backs to stare at the ceiling. Most of them weren’t orphans in truth, but rather abandoned by poverty stricken parents for minor birth defects like a club foot or port wine stain on the face. I was sitting next to my best friend and we both turned to each other and started crying. If we had been born over there, we both would have ended up like that. I was born severly pigeon toed, and my friend was born with her hips dislocated. Both were simple fixes, even for what passed as ‘poor’ in America. But had we been born in the Eastern Block we would have been rejectex as flawed. Now we know the pigeon toed thing was a secondary sign to my then-unknow genetic disorder. Downs babies die because they aren’t ‘perfect’ and there is a test to tell people that before they are born. My mom would never have had an abortion, but these eugenics pushes, it just screams out that people like me (and as mentioned above Josh) are here just because we had the sheer luck to be conceived with a disorder that is undetectable. The thinly veiled hate behind these pushes to identify ‘problem’ children in time to abort them is not just focused on the one disorder easily identified, but indicative of a greater societal hatred of anyone without what some liberal elitist decides is perfect ‘quality of life’. Humans are not flower vases to be thrown away if broken, we maintain our human-ness, our worth, regardless of any flaws. Yes, sometimes those flaws make life more difficult, sometimes parents aren’t ‘up for’ those difficulties, sometimes *we* aren’t mentally able to handle those difficulties. But the one thing about overcoming hardship, about the indominable human spirit, is that you must be alive for it to happen.
” PLEASE, TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE EXTREME ISOLATION I FEEL AS A ‘LESS-THAN’. It doesn’t help either, when people who are trolls get response, I get zip. I often wonder: ‘Am I such a pain? Can PL afford to continue to ignore what I say? Do they want me to leave?’”
I certainly don’t want you to feel like your story isn’t being heard John. I am sorry if you took anything I said about it being okay for people to be happy at the negative test results as denying your humanity or anything like that. I don’t think anyone, regardless of health or status is a “less than” or deserves less love or life than anyone else.
I was lead to believe from some “light” reading on these early detection tests that they are NOT “very accurate”. Something in the 80% accuracy range. I guess that is accurate for most people, for me it’s not enough. In fact the article I read had one case story in it where the parents were told their child was a boy and had DS and the baby was a girl with normal chromosomes…
wish I remembered where or had time to search for it, it was a prolife site.
Babies as commodities does not set well with me. We definitely believe that things happen for a reason in my house, God gives you trials to make you more like Jesus (or a ‘better person’ if you don’t believe—not a great comparison but the best I can drum up for a secular POV), being like Jesus is the goal in a Christian’s life, therefore trials are good things. This has been true in our own lives time and again.
My stepmother once told me that if my brother had tested positive for anything she would have had a late term abortion b/c “I just don’t have the patience”, I often thought to myself, “you might have been happier if you had a child with DS, your life is so empty right now.” :(
I’m pregnant with our 4th child, 3 living 1 in Heaven, I go to the OB tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll be asked the questions about the ‘early prevention’ tests and again I’ll get another chance to witness to the mw/ob about why every life, not matter how short or how painful, is precious.
Maybe your child becomes paralyzed in an accident.
Maybe they are allergic to vaccines and have a reaction that leaves them mentally challenged.
Maybe they get an incurable disease. Lose an arm. Go blind.
Maybe they voted for Obama.
As someone who’s had a visible birth defect (literally plain as the nose on my face) my entire life that has made my life extremely difficult particularly in the social realm while dealing with my peers, maybe I should’ve been aborted, huh?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Just kidding! Get stuffed, anyone who thinks killing me in utero would’ve been doing me a favor! ;P
My father was a perfectly normal child until he was scared by a dog around the age of 3. Then his family discovered that he had alopecia totalis. My grandmother made him wear a wig, and it was hard for him growing up, too. I’m just glad mom and dad never pushed for me to have surgery, or like, wear a fake nose or something. XD
As science evolves and next generation sequencing evolves…more parents will have the opportunity to abort children with defects. It is a wonderful thing and technology will continue to give everyone the ability to choose to abort children they don’t want to raise. Why is this bad again?
Because people don’t have to die just because their parents don’t like or want them?
Just throwing that out there.
People??? Try again Jackie boy.
Oh, so sorry Jake. “Blobs of cells” or whatever. Still, they are human organisms. Shouldn’t have to die because the people who parented them don’t want them.
And lol @ you calling them “children” and then denying they are people. Freudian slip?
Meh, children, potential children… Doesn’t much matter. I think you get the point. Parents get to choose to not have a child with downs! That is a wonderful thing. Freud has nothing to do with it. Scrape the cells or the “children” out of the womb if you don’t want them.
Fine. I’ll counter your argument…people DO get to die because their mother chooses. That is the law and it is a wonderful thing!
Serious question, Jake. We usually just make fun of each other but I am honestly curious. You have a few kids, right? Can you honestly look at them and think that there was a time in their life that it would be okay for your wife to, as you so delicately put it, scrape them out the womb? Like, you can honestly say you have no issue with them being dead as long as they weren’t developed past a certain point?
And people can choose to not have a child with Down’s without killing him or her. Adoption isn’t ideal but it exists.
Jack,
Yes I have two boys, ages 12 and 8…and I can honestly tell you that if my wife chose not to have them or decided to scrape them out of the womb, that I would 1000 percent support that decision and be happy with it. And before you fly off the handle and accuse me of being a heartless jerk, believe me (or don’t I don’t care) that I love and adore my boys.
Meh, I’ll never get how you can see your kids, as awesome as they are and still think that it’s okay to take their lives as long as they were young enough. Seriously never going to get it.
Fair enough.
people DO get to die because their mother chooses. That is the law and it is a wonderful thing!
If choosing to think about children like this is not a mental illness and/or the most severe disability, I don’t know what is.
Jake – it’s a funny world in which rational people arrive at such widely different conclusions about what is right and wrong – your views seem quite alien to me, and yet, no doubt, mine seem equally unfathomable to you. But that’s a great thing about the internet – we can learn about what other people think.
So, can you help me understand your opinions and feelings about this topic?
Clearly, if, which heaven forfend, one of your children should become seriously disabled now, you would care for him with devotion and love for as long as it took. Yet some years previously, you would have been content to dispose of the physical entity in some ways continuous with that child today, if you had found out he (or “it” as you might have said?) would be disabled to the same extent.
What I’m really interested to understand (and I really truly don’t understand, but think it may be possible I’m missing something) is what’s the cut-off point? When was the moment at which you switched from thinking of the blob of cells as disposable, to thinking of it as infinitely valuable? Was it at birth? Or some months before? Or some months after? And what is it about that moment?
Or perhaps it’s not a particular moment… but then… there’s a grey area of some months when if someone said “can we kill / dispose of this bundle of cells” you wouldn’t have known for sure?
As I say, I’m not trying to get at you or change your mind, but I’m really and truly interested to understand another human’s way of thinking on this momentous issue, which is so mysterious to me.
Best wishes
Joshua
Meh, children, potential children… Doesn’t much matter.
Actually, it matters quite a bit. There’s a substantial difference between gametes and new human organisms. We aren’t out collecting signatures and protesting to Save The Sperm, Jake.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being happy your child doesn’t have a genetic issue. I think it’s unfair to act like people shouldn’t wish for a healthy baby, health problems in kids with Down’s can get really expensive and stressful, not to mention they might need caretakers for their entire lives depending on how cognitively functioning they are. Some people don’t feel able to handle this. That isn’t an argument for aborting, of course, but it is understandable why people would be happy that their child won’t face these struggles. I think that people with special needs children should have better access to affordable healthcare and family support systems. My sister’s daughter’s medical bills run up to the thousands every month and not all of that is covered, she even has great insurance.
I agree, Jack. It is HARD to have a child with disabilities and it isn’t really fair to shame a couple for feeling relief that that’s a struggle they won’t have to face, at least not right now (no telling what comes in the future). My other half’s older brother has moderate mental problems – he can hold down a job and a conversation, but not live alone. His mother has spent the last 45 years caring for him – he is basically, care-wise, like having a 15-year old boy living with you. Not entirely dependent but not independent either. It has been hard on her but the really hard part will come when she can no longer care for him, which is a reality that must be faced. He is too high-functioning and his IQ too close to normal to qualify for any sort of financially-aided assisted living situations, but he definitely cannot live on his own. He can’t come live with us (I offered) because it honestly took him about 20 years to build up his current support system (a boss that understands, a handful of friends from high school who have not moved away and who help him out a lot, etc) and I don’t think that he would really ever bounce back from being removed from that system – I don’t think he would be able to start over again, get and keep another job, etc. I think that being uprooted at this point would be the end of the independence he does have, which would be devastating. We can’t go live with him because the industry we both work in basically only exists in our area; it would be like working daily in movies but moving out of LA.
And so that means that the only real option is to pay out-of-pocket for assisted living care/group home structure, for basically decades of his life. His mom’s savings are modest and he earns very little money himself. It’s just not even in the realm of possibility. It’s a really tough situation that nobody can really figure out. Disabilities are not just hard when it’s a kid – they are a lifelong struggle in a world that is not set up to accommodate or even accept your family.
His mom would never in a million years choose not to have him rather than to have him struggle. She loves him dearly! But if somebody waved a magic wand and said, “He is not disabled anymore,” she would probably fall to the ground crying from happiness. Not because disabilities are bad or icky or whatever but because they are HARD and it is hard to watch your child go through that.
Jake, you don’t love your boys that much if you would kill them for something like Down Syndrome.
During each ppregnancy for my boys, we were offered the fetal testing for Down Syndrome. We stared blankly at the Christian OB who knew we were pro-life. There is only one reason to conduct that test. All other clinical options (detecting heart defect, etc.) are detected through other means at other times.
It is wrong to kill a human in order to avoid difficulty and frustration. Right now, there are plenty of people each of us could kill to avoid frustration and to ease our path to happiness. we don’t kill them because the powers-that-be protest them – the not-yet-born are voiceless, and don’t vote. We have power over that class of humans, and we abuse that poewr. Just like we did with slaves.
One day, when they are old enough to understand this whole deal, I will tell each boy that I avoided the Down Syndrome test because I love them that much that I would accept them even if they had Mongoloid eyes, rode on the short bus, and drooled all the time. This is in the medical record, so there is no question.
One of your sons may call you one day and inform you that their baby, in the womb, tested positive for Down Syndrome. And ask, is it OK to abort this baby?
You will say, “yes.”
Or, maybe they will call and share the news that your grandson or granddaughter tested negative, and will be thrilled to tell Grandpa and Grandma.
The son will consider: “Dad, did they have the test for Down Syndrome when Mom was pregnant with me?”
“Yes, son.”
“Dad, did you guys test me for Down Syndrome?”
“Yes, son.”
“Dad, would you have aborted me if I had Down Syndrome?”
“No, son, because your mother would have stopped me. If it were up to me, I would have had them scrape those cells right out.”
“Dad, what about my brother – did you guys test him for Down Syndrome?”
“Yes, son.”
“Dad, would you have aborted my brother if he tested positive?”
“Yes, son. I would have said, scrape him right out of there.”
Fifteen years ago, a pregnant acquaintance of mine told my sister and her friends how she would be testing for Down Syndrome that week. She added that if the test came up positive, she would be aborting. The test was negative and she gave birth to her son.
During part of the basketball season this year, this boy sat on the bench and was not dressed out in his ball uniform. The reason? Low grades.
If “mental illness” could be detected in the womb, I guess Jake would have been a goner.
JAKE: I just wonder, how did your kids go from having no value to having supreme value in your life? Is it birth? Because that’s just changing locations. Is it age? Because that’s just development, not the species or essence of who your sons are. How is it that where you are or how old you are can deem you worthless, and by your own father?
Wow. How sad are you, and those dear boys of yours. Do you they know they were once expendable?
While Jake’s attitude may appear to some as revolting … maybe: crude. It is not entirely unknown. I grew-up with such a ‘friend’. He was/is totally oblivious to how deeply his ‘science-first’ attitude affects others.
One example is his son Dave (named after his deceased father). Dave grew-up with a limp from an overgrowth in one foot. His Dad”s reaction was to give David the nickname ‘Bozzo’. I have always considered this derogatory,
Seems very much like Reality, too!
I’m curious, Jake. My daughter was diagnosed with autism when she was 5. Should I have had the “choice” to kill her at that point if I didn’t feel equipped to care for a child with autism? If not, why not?
What most people don’t realize is that there is a WAITING LIST to adopt children with Down syndrome. Many couples go overseas to adopt children with DS from countries where these amazing children are institutionalized.
Our daughter is now 11, and we wouldn’t trade her for anything – our lives have been filled with more love, joy, and laughter than we ever thought possible.
We aren’t one of “those” families – NO family is. Our strength came AFTER our daughter’s diagnosis; we never imagined we would be able to handle what life handed us, but we’ve taken it one day at a time.
Thankfully, our daughter doesn’t judge us harshly – she loves us despite all of our flaws…..