When a child in the womb is diagnosed with Downs Syndrome or other significant handicap, some doctors will advise abortion, informing their patients that the quality of life for both the child and the family will be very poor. Iceland is seeking to irradicate people with Downs by encouraging testing and abortion. Unfortunately, even in the U.S., 67% of children diagnosed pre-natally with Downs are aborted.  But doctors are often uninformed not only about support available to such families, but the joy that so many children with Downs brings to their families.  Some people actually call the extra chromosome present in Downs Syndrome “the Love Chromosome”.  As the number of individuals living with Downs declines, the amount of support available for them may decline. One mother in Australia was encouraged multiple times by her doctor to abort her child.  After the child was a year old, she wrote a powerful letter to the prenatal specialist. She shared the letter on Facebook, along with a picture of her daughter (shown on the right). Several states in the U.S. have attempted to restrict abortions based on prenatal diagnoses, seeing them as a deadly means of discrimination against people with disabilities. The bills have not succeeded to be signed into law. 

Other parents receive the tragic diagnosis that their child will only live a few hours or a few weeks after birth. Doctors very often will encourage abortion, perhaps in a misguided attempt to spare the parents continuing sorrow by eliminating the additional months of pregnancy and brief lifespan by “getting it over with”.  But parents who do give birth to their child treasure whatever small amount of time they have with their child and know that the cause of death was their condition, not their own decision to abort. In several cases the children live significantly longer than the doctor’s prediction.