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Influential British mom: Selective termination is genocide

The Evening Standard (London)

July 8, 2008 Tuesday

Caroline Armstrong-Jones, who organized last week’s Tory Summer Ball, talks powerfully about changing attitudes towards the handicapped, the arrogance of consultants and future hopes for her own 11-year-old daughter with Down syndrome

BYLINE: ALISON ROBERTS

SECTION: A; Pg. 22

ELEVEN-year-old India Armstrong-Jones is sitting at the kitchen table looking at photographs of herself as a younger child. Here she is on holiday in Mustique, and in Wales, sitting on her horse Charlie, who elicits a particular cry of delight.

And here she is wow! at Brooklyn Beckham’s birthday party, which her mother Caroline and father Peregrine, as upmarket events organizers, threw for Posh and Becks.

Most 11-year-olds would coo over this one, but it’s hard to know exactly what India, who has Down syndrome, remembers or recognizes. The Beckhams? India looks blank. Her mother laughs.

“She’s a very content person. I think a lot of ‘normal’ children are actually very discontent. They’re always wanting another game or another this or that, which is quite unattractive, really.

“The high they get from a new toy is over very quickly and you feel there’ll always be a kind of vacuum in their life. India’s not like that.”

Caroline and Peregrine, who is Lord Snowdon’s half-brother, helped to organise the Tory Summer Ball at the Roundhouse in Camden last week where Caroline took to the stage and spoke movingly about taking on the job “for India”, in the hope that a Cameron government “will champion the needs and improve the lives of those with disabilities of all kinds”.

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