{"id":189905,"date":"2018-10-23T10:35:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-23T15:35:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=189905"},"modified":"2018-10-23T17:58:40","modified_gmt":"2018-10-23T22:58:40","slug":"down-syndrome-enriches-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/down-syndrome-enriches-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother of child with Down syndrome: ‘She enriches our lives’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Patricia E. Bauer wrote about her child with Down syndrome, Margaret, in The Washington Post. First, she acknowledges that many people would have aborted her daughter.<\/p>\n

I know most women of childbearing age that we may encounter have judged her and her cohort and have found their lives not to be worth living.<\/em><\/p>\n

To them, Margaret falls into the category of avoidable human suffering. At best, a tragic mistake. \u2026 Less than human. A drain on society. That someone I love is regarded this way is unspeakably painful to me.<\/em><\/p>\n

READ: Jamie Foxx says he \u2018learned how to live\u2019 from his sister with Down syndrome<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

She describes a conversation at a dinner party where an Ivy League ethics director was saying all babies with Down syndrome should be aborted:<\/p>\n

At a dinner party not long ago, I was seated next to the director of an Ivy League ethics program. In answer to another guest\u2019s question, he said he believes that prospective parents have a moral obligation to undergo prenatal testing and to terminate their pregnancy to avoid bringing forth a child with a disability, because it was immoral to subject a child to the kind of suffering he or she would have to endure. (When I started to pipe up about our family\u2019s experience, he smiled and turned to the lady on the left.)<\/em><\/p>\n

The director ignored Bauer as she tried to tell him her about her daughter. His mind was made up — to him, children with disabilities were unworthy of life. Bauer’s real-life experience had no impact on his ableism.<\/p>\n