Where are the Down children?

A friend said to me the other day, "Ever notice how you don't see Down syndrome people anymore? Where are they?"

Answer: dead, 90 percent of them, by the abortionist's hand. Because their lives are deemed not worth living by their mothers (and fathers).

My Dallas friend Christine Allison is the mother of a Down daughter. Jack Fowler on the Corner quotes a 1989 piece she wrote for Human Life Review about her little girl. It's beautiful -- but it indicates that that the 90 percent figure is nothing new:

Most women who choose to be tested (amniocentesis to detect Down’s Syndrome) will also choose to abort the baby if the test is positive. Some studies say the figure is 90%. . . . to muddy matters even more, the women who test are more often than not the mothers of “wanted” babies. That is, I want you if you are the baby I want. The idea that a mother might ever choose to have or not have her child based on knowing something about that child – his IQ, what he will look like, his emotional demeanor – defies all logic of the heart. But this is an age where even the risk of accepting one’s own progeny, for better or for worse, has become too much to contemplate . . .

In one of the most poignant, fierce, and determined battles to live deeply and well, Down syndrome people are breaking through the walls of their own retardation and grasping their world. Yet, as a species they appear to be doomed. Unlike those who would abort them, these Down people have accepted the dare of life, which is to live it. In California, an eleven-year old girl writes her first line on a computer. She painstakingly taps out “I like God’s finest whispers.” In Brooklyn, a Down fifth-grader dashes off the bus to his mother with a report card from his yeshiva; he has earned average grades in all his classes and speaks and writes in three different languages. And then there’s our Chrissie, who last week crawled seven paces for the saltine cracker her dad held outstretched to her. She had been battling for that saltine for two months . . .

Chrissie is a blessing in a way a normal child is not. It is in describing her that the word “special” rises from banality and comes grippingly alive. That she may now be a member of the last generation of her kind, a group silently and methodically targeted for extinction, alarms my heart. Especially now, knowing as I do that when she is older, Chrissie will be able to read – and understand – what I have written.

A group silently and methodically targeted for extinction. Yes, that's precisely it.