A Very Personal Column from George Will: 'Eugenics By Abortion'

Eugenics By Abortion: "In America, more than 80 percent of the babies diagnosed prenatally with Down syndrome are aborted. This is dismaying to, among others, the American Association of People with Disabilities, whose premise is that 'disability is a natural part of the human experience.'
...One mother who participated in a study of 3,000 members of five state associations of parents of Down syndrome children reported that when, in 1999, she was told that the baby she was expecting had Down syndrome, a geneticist showed her "a really pitiful video first of people with Down syndrome who were very low tone and lethargic-looking and then proceeded to tell us that our child would never be able to read, write or count change." Try telling that to Jon Will as he navigates Washington's subway system to use his season tickets to the Wizards basketball games and (soon) Nationals baseball games.

When he was born in 1972 -- a time when an episode on a network television hospital drama asserted that people with Down syndrome could not be toilet-trained -- the hospital geneticist asked Jon's parents if they intended to take him home. That question is, surely, no longer asked when Down syndrome babies are born. But there are modern pressures to prevent such babies from being born, pressures that include the perfection-is-an-entitlement attitude of some expecting parents...."
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Such a sad serious issue, pour out your heart and read this and think about the implications. My parents have a dear neighbor with a Down's son who is the most remarkable precious person you will ever meet who has more smiles and laughs in a day than most of us have in a week...