"What do we need to do? We need to talk. We need to teach. And we need to remember." Dear Doctor what about learn?

This debate does not belong in a country that gives the families of people with a disability minimum support. We have all seen the octogenarian parent holding the hand of his or her middle aged Down Syndrome child as they cross the road or do the grocery shopping. Parents must always have the right to choose and while the choice to have a disabled child means to care full time until you die, ragged with worry over what is going to happen to the person you have left behind, it is quite reasonable that parents choose not to go down that path. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole country to raise a disabled one. Until this country steps up to do so, the good doctor should stop telling people how to live their lives.

Estelles is right.
It's all very well for the author to say how 'educable' , loveable and personable people with Down's Syndrome can be, the fact remains that they can almost never live an independent life.

Thus, their parents/siblings are also never going to be able to stop being a resident carer for their family member for a lifetime of this person, because they can now live a long life.

People with Downs Syndrome almost always suffer from other physical disabilities, such as heart or bladder problems, as well as often severe intellectual problems.

Not all parents want to bring a child into the world that will definitely have some or all of these problems, no matter how 'educable' they may be.

I would never say how some parents should react after being told they have a Downs Syndrome pregnancy.
As I say with all decisions about abortion, it is up to the parents, and is no one else's business.

Both Estelles and Suseonline are wrong. There is never a right to choose to exercise lethal prejudice against a defenceless unborn child because that child has a disability.

Children at risk of abortion because of a disability have human rights.

Nazi abortion and euthanasia programmes were condemned at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity— "...unborn children were denied legal protection".

Responding to Nazi atrocities, modern international human right law prohibited removal of human rights protection from any group of human beings.

Both abortion and euthanasia are human rights violations involving arbitrary deprivation of life. The right to be protected by law from arbitrary deprivation of one’s life is guaranteed in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

The drafting history of the ICCPR makes it clear that medicalized killing, even in response to distress, is always a violation of the fundamental human rights principle of inalienability. Human beings cannot be deprived of the substance of their rights, not in any circumstances, not even at their own request, not even at the request of their mothers, in the case of children at risk of abortion because of Down syndrome.

The biological and legal truth about each child at risk of abortion because of a disability is that he or she is a human being entitled under the rule of law to human rights protection "before as well as after birth", as recognized by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, Australia and other members of the international community solemnly agreed:

•to protect children at risk of arbitrary deprivation of life because of their disabilities;

•to provide them with prenatal as well as post-natal care;

•to institute community education programmes that foster respect for them as part of human diversity and humanity; and

•to combat stereotypes, prejudices and harmful practices perpetrated against them.

It is hard to find a more harmful practice than the promotion of Down syndrome testing which leads currently to the selective abortion of more than nine out of every ten children detected prenatally to have this disability.

Personally, I would like to commend and thank the author for his thoughtful contribution to the ongoing debate about pre-natal screening, which is obviously, indisputably designed to "weed out" any foetus suspected of being in any way disabled. The fact that this sort of screening not only occurs, but is being and will indisputably continue to be further developed, refined, expanded and encouraged, demonstrates very starkly how deeply mainstream society still rejects people with disability, despite all the syrupy lip service paid over recent decades as to how much people with disabilities are "valued" and their fundamental human rights respected and acknowledged blah blah blah blah. And as long as any society continues to reject - and indeed,fear - people with disabilities at this primitive, visceral level (not all that far from the practise in less medically advanced societies of automatically suffocating any obviously disabled child at birth), then why would that society be keen and willing to provide the sorts of costly, ongoing supports and services which Estelles bemoans the absence of? If you support and defend pre-natal screening to "weed out" foetuses suspected of disability, then don't expect society to help anyone who slips through the net as it were, and manages against the odds to live.

The Nazi atrocities were atrocious because the fascist state forced women to have abortions whether they wanted one or not. A woman in our society making an informed medical decision without pressure from the state is a very different thing.

Cheers,

Tony