By Amy Julia Becker in the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Sunday Currents section:

Becker says medicine’s “evidence-based standards of care” are skewed in favor of eliminating children with Down syndrome like her daughter Penny, with many women terminating pregnancies based on probabilities, fear and misinformation. Now expecting another child, Becker says she wishes obstetricians would update their ten-year-old brochures and

… include the fact that the life expectancy of people with Down syndrome has doubled in the past 25 years, or that the average IQ of a person with Down syndrome has doubled over the course of the 20th century, or that many physical “defects” can be corrected relatively easily because of advances in medical care. (Penny had a hole in her heart, for instance, that may well have killed her a few decades ago. Now, it didn’t even warrant an overnight stay in the hospital.)

I will follow my doctor’s orders and have a level 2 ultrasound. I will pray that this baby’s heart, lungs, brain and limbs look healthy and whole. I will try to remember what I felt when the words Down syndrome first became a part of our reality. I will try to have compassion for every person who has trouble understanding the blessing Penny is to our family.

I will also hope and pray that physicians advising women who are frightened, confused and faced with life-changing decisions will offer those women a true choice, an informed choice, a choice based on the evidence that all of life is fragile and uncertain, with potential for heartbreak, and for great joy.

Becker is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 2:32 pm and is filed under NOT2BEMISSED, abortion, commentary, first-person, genetics, medicine, prenatal diagnosis, selective termination. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  Email This Post