Tuesday, December 13, 2016

France and aborting fetuses with Down syndrome

By and large prenatal genetic testing is eliminating babies who would otherwise be born with Down syndrome. In approximately 90 percent of instances in which Down syndrome is revealed, the fetus is aborted. And if the French court's recent decision is any indication, France wants to keep it that way.

The court upheld a ruling of the French Broadcasting Council to ban a two-minute commercial produced by the Global Down Syndrome Foundation titled “Dear Future Mom” that addresses the fears and concerns of a mother who discovers she is carrying a baby who has Down syndrome.

“I’m scared: what kind of life will my child have?” the mother asks. Children with Down syndrome from many nations in various languages tell the future mom that her child will hug, speak, go to school, tell you he loves you and “can be happy, just like I am — and you’ll be happy, too.”

The court ruled that the video is “inappropriate” for French television, saying that the video’s depiction of happy Down syndrome children is “likely to disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices."

Columnist George F. Will put it more sharply. In his recent Washington Post piece, he wrote, "The court has said, in effect, that the lives of Down syndrome people — and by inescapable implication, the lives of many other disabled people… are of negligible value next to the desire of parents to have a child who has no special — meaning inconvenient – needs."

As a glaring example of twisted moral sensitivity, this “offensive” video was actually banned because it may cause unease in the hearts and minds of parents who chose to snuff out these unwanted lives in-utero.

The video is powerful because it depicts in living color the full and gorgeous humanity of these kids with Downs and the very real nachas [pride or gratification, especially at the achievements of one's children] and joy parents receive from raising them.

It’s a personal issue for me. I’m the proud father of a 12-year-old son who has Down syndrome (George Will also has an adult son with Downs), and I can certainly empathize with the mother’s fears in the video. If my wife and I could have somehow seen a snapshot of all the pleasure we would be getting in raising our son when he was born, a lot of our initial shock and disbelief would have dissipated.

Before my son, Yehuda, was born, I never thought that I could raise a child with Down syndrome. But so much of that thinking is based on sheer ignorance and distorted values that are rampant in society, even in Jewish communities, I am sad to say. When we reduce our children to nachas machines and props in our oh-so perfect life, the disabled child isn’t quite the image you want to broadcast on your Facebook page.

I don’t want to minimize the challenge in raising special-needs kids; it is hard work and entails unique challenges (try spending three hours a day crawling up and down stairs with your toddler for a year as part of his early intervention program!). But when our focus is on fulfilling our God-given role of helping our child reach his full potential, the rewards are just as great as raising any child, and sometimes even greater.

The key is to believe in your child’s potential and not to sell him short. A recent case in point: we decided Yehuda should try to learn to read from the Torah for his upcoming Bar Mitzvah. My wife was confident he could do it; I was less so, but let’s give it a shot and not assume he can’t until he tries. It took only four days for him to master his aliyah[being called up to the Torah reading at the synagogue] ; turns out he’s a natural! My wife and I, and the rest of our kids were amazed when he belted it out loud. And most importantly, Yehuda was beaming with pride and full of self-confidence, a confidence that only comes from putting in effort and attaining a genuine accomplishment. That is how it is with all kids, with Downs or without.

Former U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey said, “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.” The French court’s recent decision reinforces the distorted value that some lives are worth more than others and reveals a troubling state of its moral health.


http://www.aish.com/ci/s/France-and-Aborting-Fetuses-with-Downs-Syndrome.html?s=mpw
Video at link
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju-q4OnBtNU

3 comments:

  1. The Sensitivity Police Strike Again
    by George Will December 3, 2016 8:00 PM

    The court has ruled that the video is -- wait for it -- "inappropriate" for French television.

    The word “inappropriate” is increasingly used inappropriately. It is useful to describe departures from good manners or other social norms, such as wearing white after Labor Day or using the salad fork with the entree. But the adjective has become a splatter of verbal fudge, a weasel word falsely suggesting measured seriousness. Its misty imprecision does not disguise, it advertises, the user’s moral obtuseness.

    A French court has demonstrated how “inappropriate” can be an all-purpose device of intellectual evasion and moral cowardice. The court said it is inappropriate to do something that might disturb people who killed their unborn babies for reasons that were, shall we say, inappropriate.

    Prenatal genetic testing enables pregnant women to be apprised of a variety of problems with their unborn babies, including Down syndrome. It is a congenital condition resulting from a chromosomal defect that causes varying degrees of mental disability and some physical abnormalities, such as low muscle tone, small stature, flatness of the back of the head and an upward slant to the eyes. Within living memory, Down syndrome people were called Mongoloids.

    Now they are included in the category called “special needs” people. What they most need is nothing special. It is for people to understand their aptitudes, and to therefore quit killing them in utero.

    Down syndrome, although not common, is among the most common congenital anomalies at 49.7 per 100,000 births. In approximately 90 percent of instances when prenatal genetic testing reveals Down syndrome, the baby is aborted. Cleft lips or palates, which occur in 72.6 per 100,000 births, also can be diagnosed in utero and sometimes are the reason a baby is aborted.(continued)

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  2. (continued)In 2014, in conjunction with World Down Syndrome Day (March 21), the Global Down Syndrome Foundation prepared a two-minute video titled “Dear Future Mom” to assuage the anxieties of pregnant women who have learned that they are carrying a Down syndrome baby. More than 7 million people have seen the video online in which one such woman says, “I’m scared: what kind of life will my child have?” Down syndrome children from many nations tell the woman that her child will hug, speak, go to school, tell you he loves you and “can be happy, just like I am — and you’ll be happy, too.”

    The French state is not happy about this. The court has ruled that the video is — wait for it — “inappropriate” for French television. The court upheld a ruling in which the French Broadcasting Council banned the video as a commercial. The court said the video’s depiction of happy Down syndrome children is “likely to disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices.” The court said the video’s depiction of happy Down syndrome children is ‘likely to disturb the conscience of women who had lawfully made different personal life choices.’

    So, what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses. There, in many nations, sensitivity bureaucracies have been enforcing the relatively new entitlement to be shielded from whatever might disturb, even inappropriate jokes. And now this rapidly metastasizing right has come to this: A video that accurately communicates a truthful proposition — that Down syndrome people can be happy and give happiness — should be suppressed because some people might become ambivalent, or morally queasy, about having chosen to extinguish such lives because...

    This is why the video giving facts about Down syndrome people is so subversive of the flaccid consensus among those who say aborting a baby is of no more moral significance than removing a tumor from a stomach. Pictures persuade. Today’s improved prenatal sonograms make graphic the fact that the moving fingers and beating heart are not mere “fetal material.” They are a baby. Toymaker Fisher-Price, children’s apparel manufacturer OshKosh, McDonald’s, and Target have featured Down syndrome children in ads that the French court would probably ban from television.

    The court has said, in effect, that the lives of Down syndrome people — and by inescapable implication, the lives of many other disabled people — matter less than the serenity of people who have acted on one or more of three vicious principles: That the lives of the disabled are not worth living. Or that the lives of the disabled are of negligible value next to the desire of parents to have a child who has no special — meaning inconvenient – needs. Or that government should suppress the voices of Down syndrome children in order to guarantee other people’s right not to be disturbed by reminders that they have made lethal choices on the basis of one or both of the first two inappropriate principles.

    Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442735/dear-future-mom-down-syndrome-anti-abortion-video-ban-france

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  3. A 26-year-old cookie entrepreneur who was tired of being rejected by prospective employers has turned her love of baking into a booming enterprise. Collete Divitto, who has Down syndrome, began baking for her local grocery store, the Golden Goose Market, but now has more than 4,000 orders to fill since her story went viral, Inside Edition reported.

    Divitto, whose specialty is a chocolate chip cookie dipped in cinnamon called “The Amazing,” never believed her parents when they said she could profit off her skills.

    “We kept telling her, ‘This is a really good cookie. You could sell this,’” Rosemary Alfredo told the news outlet.

    But after being told she wasn’t the “right fit” for one too many job openings, Divitto decided to take a shot at it.

    “It’s very upsetting to me,” she told CBS Boston. “It’s very hard to find a paying job for people like me who have special needs.”

    Since her story began circulating, The Commonwealth Kitchen, a non-profit business incubator, has stepped in to help her scale up her production. Divitto has also started a GoFundMe campaign to help raise funds for a facility.

    http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/12/16/woman-with-down-syndrome-starts-amazing-cookie-business.html

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