Richard Dawkins: ‘It Would Be Immoral’ to Give Birth to A Child with Down’s Syndrome

[Heddi]

85. Downs Syndrome isn't just a cognitive disability. There are physical issues as well

Heart defects that can guarantee a lifetime of surgeries (especially throughout childhood), medications, and complications. GI issues that can guarantee a lifetime of surgeries (especially throughout childhood), medications, and complications.

Parents have the additional burden of having to contemplate what will happen to their adult child with Downs Syndrome when the parents die. Does the child become the responsibilty of siblings? Do you know how absolutely destructive it is to send a 45 year old adult with Downs Syndrome, who has lived with his parents up until the point of the death of the parents, to live in a group home or institutional setting?

This is nothing even remotely close to aborting a gay, left-handed, or red-headed foetus.

Not every person has the financial or emotional ability to properly raise a child with developmental disabilities, and the physical disabilities and congenital disorders that are inherent to chromosomal disorders. This isn't a "oh, they're slow, let's kill them." This is "I'm a single mother making minimum wage. How can I properly care for a child that will not only have cognitive disabilities to overcome, but deal with the repeated surgeries and hospitalizations, and properly save for their care upon my death?"

You're simplifying this issue in a very deceptive way. Not everyone is emotionally or financially prepared to be the parent of a child with DS (or any other chromosomal disorder). Not every DS child is functional and full of hugs and love. They can be violent, injurious, nonverbal, profoundly disabled and unable to perform even the most simple of tasks. They may have the cognitive development of a 2 year old even as they, themselves, are 30 or 40 or 50 years old. They may need 24 hour, around the clock care. They may never be able to live independently, or feed or bathe or clothe themselves.

THe idea that every child with DS turns into an adult with DS who can work a low-wage job and live semi-independently, and that the choice to abort a child with a chromosomal abnormality is eugenics is deceptive, wrong, and based purely on emotion and without any regards to facts, reason, OR the situation that the mother/father/family find themselves in.