.Hi Mary Ellen
You made me think. 90% being aborted is such a lot of kids lost. DS babies just look like all other babies to me as most of my friends new crop of babies are squishy and red. I really don’t see how different DS babies are to all other babies. How DS kids progress though does depend so much on their degree of mental disability. This I can see in a church friends 3 boys who have been adopted and all are downs. The middle boy now at 18 is very switched on and mildly disabled being well able to read and write and hold down a job whereas the other two boys are much less able . Similar in many respects to kids on the ASD spectrum. They are charting the genes responsible for autism and it makes me wonder about the implications for autistic kids in utero as I am sure in the next 20-30 years they will have a prenatal test for autism.
However to be cynical I did wonder if the special needs funding will flow in Alaska since she had Trig when it should have been there for all the other parents of sn kids who needed the extra help before Trig’s advent. Here in Australia special needs funding for education and therapy can be just as limited. I went to a meeting on this issue tonight and you can understand how cranky parents can get.How a society treats its kids with disablity is a good guage of how well functioninag and civic it is.
Karnak
Thanks for sharing this Mary Ellen. What a great column!
.Hi Mary Ellen
You made me think. 90% being aborted is such a lot of kids lost. DS babies just look like all other babies to me as most of my friends new crop of babies are squishy and red. I really don’t see how different DS babies are to all other babies. How DS kids progress though does depend so much on their degree of mental disability. This I can see in a church friends 3 boys who have been adopted and all are downs. The middle boy now at 18 is very switched on and mildly disabled being well able to read and write and hold down a job whereas the other two boys are much less able . Similar in many respects to kids on the ASD spectrum. They are charting the genes responsible for autism and it makes me wonder about the implications for autistic kids in utero as I am sure in the next 20-30 years they will have a prenatal test for autism.
However to be cynical I did wonder if the special needs funding will flow in Alaska since she had Trig when it should have been there for all the other parents of sn kids who needed the extra help before Trig’s advent. Here in Australia special needs funding for education and therapy can be just as limited. I went to a meeting on this issue tonight and you can understand how cranky parents can get.How a society treats its kids with disablity is a good guage of how well functioninag and civic it is.
Karnak