The Truth About Down Syndrome (What Dawkins got wrong)

[jwirr]

36. In all my years of working with clients with down's I have seen only one child that showed any signs

of being mean and he was in an abusive family. It was learned behavior. Most of my clients believed in "don't worry - be happy". One of the problems with Dawkins theory is that before the child is born it is impossible to determine the level of functioning. So you can have a child who is severe and may not live very long or you can have a child who will be able to function in a very normal way. So he would have all of them aborted to keep the most severe from suffering?

I once sat in a classroom where we had a visitor who had been a young teen in Nazi Germany taking part in a discussion about just this subject. He let much of the class hang themselves with attitudes like Dawkins. He deliberately sat in the seat right behind me as he had been clued into my daughter's illness. When everyone but me had a say he asked me what I thought - my family would not give up my daughter for anything. She is the joy of our life. (She does not have Down's but a very severe developmental disability.)

Then he told us what he had learned in Germany when he was young. The summary was that whenever you take a subsection of society out of that society there is a vacuum and the society is less for the lose. Dawkins is wrong. And for a disabled person to say this is very narrow minded.