Mercy Killing

A number of people have noted this piece in yesterday's Washington Post by a woman writing about her decision to abort after her son was pre-natally diagnosed with Down syndrome.

A few months ago I dug into that stats about this a bit and found that those who do bring children diagnosed with Down syndrome to term are overwhelmingly religious, with most of them being Catholics.

Back when we were expecting our first child, my boss (two companies back) and his wife were expecting their first as well. They were 18 years older than us, with a total household income 10x ours. (So of course they were convinced they couldn't afford for the wife to be stay at home mom.)

Being secular "plan it all" types they had an amnio, and the news they had was that their daughter would probably have a spinal deformity which might leave her handicapped for life, or even cause her to die shortly after birth. So of course the aborted.

I remember my boss telling me, "We're just not set up to handle the stress of dealing with raising a disabled child." And I thought: You make over 200k and your wife is a clinical psychiatrist. If you're not able to find a way to deal, who the hell is?

My wife and I, on the other hand, were newly weds straight out of college making less than 40k off our single income and living in a one bedroom apartment (which Los Angeles being what it is cost well over 1000 a month). Yet we wouldn't have hesitated for a moment to accept a severely disable child.

Goodness knows, I'm glad my eldest daughter is the beautiful, healthy small monkey that she is. But as the day that I knew was their daughter's appointment with the surgical executioners approached, I couldn't help wishing there was some way to trade, or adopt this poor unwanted little girl whose only fault was that she was not as "perfect" as her parents wished.