This is a letter from my book 'Removing the Fear of Raising a Child with Down Syndrome - Waising Miss Chloe' .Sadly, it is more relevant today than it was 4 years ago, with the advent of the Down Syndrome blood test imminent in Australia.
Please don't allow Australia, to go the way of Iceland and eliminate a group of people because..well no-one really knows why they have to be eliminated.
Open letter to Doctors and Obstetricians.
My name is
Sue Dymond and I have a young adult daughter who has Down Syndrome.
Fortunately
for me, her and all who know her, I was too young to have the amniocentesis when
I was pregnant. I say fortunately, because when my baby had tested positive to
Down Syndrome, I would have terminated the pregnancy. I wanted nothing to do
with a disabled child and all the hard work I imagined went with that job.
If this had
happened, I would have missed out on knowing one of the most pleasant,
self-assured, calm and confident young women I have ever met.
I find it
very, very sad in the 21st century that there is still such a strong
bias by the medical profession towards termination when Down Syndrome is
detected prior to birth. It is very important that we are open-minded and give
parents a balanced view of the positive and negative issues surrounding raising
a child with Down syndrome.
NEVER
ASSUME; not all parents want to terminate, and the reason many others do, is
because it is painted as such a negative, unusually an incorrect outlook of theirs and
their child’s life.
I can fully
understand this attitude 30 or 40 years ago, but today, when there are so many young people in society with Down Syndrome proving to all around them that they are very capable of learning and
being productive people in society. Admittedly they need some guidance and assistance,
but I would love some one to tell me which child doesn’t?
An interesting statistic from an Australian survey conducted in Feburary 2013 by Sue Blandford, Down Syndrome Victoria, shows: 53.5% said their child's health had been mostly excellent since birth, my daughter is one of those statistics.
This is over half of all babies born with Down Syndrome being healthy, so why are we advised to terminate on a less than 50% chance of having an unhealthy baby?
Yes, I
found the first ten – twelve years hard work, with running around to lots of
experts and professionals and teaching her basics, boundaries and consequences. I have to
say though, the past ten years she has been a delight (well mainly).
She does
volunteer work with Meals on Wheels, she helps an organisation feed the poor
every second Tuesday, she has a black-belt in Karate and is a helper teacher. Yes, she
still needs guidance and I imagine always will need some, due to her inability
to manage unforeseen circumstances.
I was
recently told by a friend that I have everything a parent would ever ask for
with Chloe. I have a child who loves me and enjoys my company and visa
versa.
Our journey
has had its challenges and will continue to, but isn’t that true of anyone who
has children?
More than
the challenges though, it has been rich with learning the important lessons in
life – and some of those lessons are not true of anyone who has children. They
are a gift to those who have a special needs person.
I ask the
medical profession to please become more learned about what happens to people
with Down Syndrome after they leave your care and then deliver the balanced
information to parents who find out they are expecting a child with Down Syndrome.
As I
mentioned at the top of this letter, the world would have been a way less rich
place, if my choice had been different based on knowing that Chloe had Down Syndrome before she was born.
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