I hope this doesn't sound too brutal to any of you, I really don't think it should.
My mother was a nurse for a very long time. Before she was an
RN, she was an
LVN, and during this time she took care of several infants with Down Syndrome. I was around to witness the strain these children caused on their families. It's hard to be around someone with only a fraction of a personality. You might say that's harsh, but that is how it seemed to me.
I am a huge believer in the value of
intelligence. I want to be able to have intense conversations with my offspring. I want to teach them about the world and life, not just how I see it, but I want to give them the tools to view the world with a more open mind and watch them go decide how they want to view the world themselves. I want to watch them discover things. I want to one day
learn from my kids.
Do any of these concepts seem brutal to you?
If they don't, then I'd hope you don't find the termination of this pregnancy too brutal.
As if there aren't enough
fantastically stupid people on the planet without any
developmental disabilities. Nevermind
programming a VCR, why can't people seem to look past the ideas their parents gave them in their youth? Why can't people seem to avoid
reactionary violence? I've met too many people who are nothing but burdens on society to create another one myself. I say this with full confidence that if I ever do get
pregnant again, and bring it to term, I will spend however long it takes raising my child to understand that
we are all one, that there is never anything to fear, because we are all brothers and sisters. I'd just like to know that my child understands these things.
So I terminated the pregnancy when I found out that my child would most likely have
Down Syndrome. I '
had an abortion'. I murdered the fetus growing inside me. I've heard this action put in all the harshest terms I could imagine and I still don't regret it.
Frankly I just don't buy the things most parents say about their kids. "I'd love my child no matter what it was?" Then why don't more people adopt children with different skin colors? Why do adoption statistics not reveal a gigantic number of rich, white,
sterile couples knocking down the doors for some developmentally disabled children with dark skin? These strike me as the people who see parenting as a novelty. It's great for the first few years, but when they start forming their own opinions, those kids need the clamps down. Those kids need to be whipped into shape. They need to be put back in line. To most of these people it's cool to 'care for an infant', but 'raising a child' is a little less interesting. Caring for an adolescent is out of the question. Tolerating an
adolescent is even rare. Eventually their caring for that infant turns into 'supporting a teenager' and even that doesn't have a lot of "love" involved.
This is not definite at all, just how I see things here in the
United States. If there is an epidemic in terms of parenting it is certainly not pregnant women who terminate babies that they see as a future burden, it's parents who just re-use lines they hear from television; "I'll love him no matter what", "That boy needs to learn some manners", "You should love me because I'm your mother", "Do as your father tells you", it's parents who don't know how to think let alone raise a mentally and physically healthy child.