From the BBC:

A UK charity has launched an informational campaign promoting the rights of people with learning disabilities to have sex and relationships.

The FPA, formerly known as the Family Planning Association, says research indicates people with learning difficulties are often denied help in pursuing relationships.

Julie Bentley, chief executive of FPA, said living independently meant more than “qualifications and securing a job”.

“Expressing your sexuality and enjoying a relationship is something everyone values,” she said.

… “Information and skills must be available to people with learning disabilities so they can enjoy intimate relationships without putting themselves at risk.”

From columnist Beverly Beckham in the Boston Globe, high praise for two books:

“Gifts - Mothers Reflect on How Children with Down Syndrome Enrich Their Lives,” edited by Kathryn Soper, and

“Road Map to Holland - How I Found My Way Through My Son’s First Two Years With Down Syndrome,” by Jennifer Graf Groneberg.

Both women have sons with Down syndrome.

At a workshop at the recent convention of the National Down Syndrome Congress, a woman who had a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome said “Gifts” saved her daughter’s life. Until she read the book, she said, she and her husband were sorry for and frightened by people with disabilities.

“Gifts” took them beyond the stereotypes and showed them that “disabled” is a loaded and omissive word with all the bad left in and all the good left out.

“Road Map to Holland” does the same thing.

Two books of love stories. Two books that are already changing the way people think.

Christine Rosen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, memorializes Harriet McBryde Johnson as someone who made society look at disability as a natural part of the human experience. Johnson, she says, demonstrated that disability transcends the convenient categories that often stymie political discourse: secular or religious, liberal or conservative. Johnson held up a mirror to a society whose acceptance of disability wanes as its scientific powers to eliminate disability grow.

As an example, Rosen cites the “rapid near-disappearance of people with Down syndrome.”

As a culture, we have made what Amy Laura Hall of Duke University Divinity School calls a “democratic calculus of worth” regarding Down Syndrome. And that calculus has resulted in a society hostile to people who refuse to make the culturally acceptable choice of ridding themselves of a disabled child before she is born.

… if choice and prevention produce a culture that equates disability with irresponsible parenting decisions, then the homage we pay to accommodation will prove hollow indeed. And as the population ages, and more Americans find themselves living with disabilities, questions about worth at the end of life will become even more pressing. Thanks to people such as Harriet Johnson, we have not yet reached the point where accommodation has given way to neglect or elimination. But we would do well to respect what Ms. Johnson’s own life so ably demonstrated: People with disabilities, she said, “have something the world needs.”

Christine Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.

From The Denver Post:

Matt Updike, an avid skier and cyclist who was paralyzed in an auto accident 11 years ago, is now gearing up for the Paralympic Games in Beijing in September to compete as a member of the U.S. Paralympic Cycling Team. He reclaimed his fit life with the help of a recreation program at Denver’s Craig Hospital, and is among a growing number of people with disabilities who are taking part in sports.

Sports of all kinds are available for the disabled — skiing, basketball, hockey, tennis, rugby and cycling, just to name a few. And some Denver gyms are equipped to meet the needs of people of all ages and abilities.

At Craig, staffers ask patients early on: “How would you like to get healthy and be healthy?” says Terry Chase, the hospital’s patient and family-education coordinator. …”And we do not make people wait until they are in perfect shape. We offer activities and outings right away.”

From the Detroit Free Press:

A team led by University of Michigan kinesiology professor Dale Ulrich is working with the charity Lose the Training Wheels to help teach kids with Down syndrome or autism in Ann Arbor how to ride bikes without training wheels.

At the same time, Ulrich is conducting a research study to learn how successful bike riding may affect these kids’ emotions and independence. Other training sessions, minus the research component, are going on across the country this summer.

Just 10 percent of kids with Down Syndrome can ride a bike, and autistic children have similar issues, said Laura Bailey at the University of Michigan News Service. By Wednesday this week, a quarter of the kids were up on two normal wheels. By the end of the five-day program before this one, 62 percent of the kids were riding.

(Free Press, U-M News Service photo)

In TCPalm.com, Stephanie Meredith challenges George Iliff’s call for broader use of selective abortion in cases of Down syndrome. Iliff wanted to avoid what he called “extreme hardship.” Meredith says public perceptions of Down syndrome are based on the experience of people who were institutionalized and deprived of education and health care. She says those perceptions do not reflect the lives of people today who have access to education, health care and community inclusion.

If Mr. Iliff truly seeks the “rational consideration of this subject,” then women should be given the opportunity to make informed decisions based on research rather than being subjected to emotional rants from either political perspective.

Meredith is an editor of this website. See her earlier letter here.

From the Riverside [California] Press-Enterprise:

Students with disabilities are paired with psychology students in the Peer Buddy Program at Elsinore High School. Among their activities: an annual prom. The program is an eye-opener for the nondisabled teens, who say it makes them re-examine their own values.

“I didn’t realize how pessimistic I was about life,” said one. “You spend time with these kids and you realize that their parents are doing everything they can to give their children an education and that they love them unconditionally.”

Above, peer buddies help Stephanie Ahlgrim prepare for the prom. Stephanie has Down syndrome. Press-Enterprise photo.

With podcast.