Who can say what about Down syndrome?

Twitter trolls on Down syndrome

“Remember ladies, get tested. If you're carrying a mong, abort the f**ker.” This and more offensive language could be read on my twitter feed last night. The Down syndrome community, being a global yet tight knit family, responded and the account was shut down within several hours.

Academics on Down syndrome

I recall another incident three years ago when respected biologist and author Richard Dawkins essentially said the same thing but more eloquently: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have a choice.” Unsurprisingly, his comments provoked a storm of protests within our own Down-community and beyond. The scientist has since published apologies of sorts, in which he is very sorry if he offended anyone with his “logical” opinion. It wasn’t his view that was wrong, he says, more the public’s “wanton eagerness to misunderstand”. In a fuller explanation on his website – entitled Abortion & Down Syndrome– the author wrote: “[....] if your morality is based, as mine is, on a desire to increase the sum of happiness and reduce suffering, the decision to deliberately give birth to a Down baby, when you have the choice to abort it early in the pregnancy, might actually be immoral from the point of view of the child’s own welfare.”

Another respected academic, philosopher Peter Singer, professor at Princeton University takes it a step further and argues in his book “Should the baby live?” that newborns with Down syndrome and other disabilities should be given a lethal injection. It is not his goal to spare babies from physical suffering but, like Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer believes, the problem is that the disabled babies don’t have ‘good prospects’. According to Singer, people with Down syndrome are 'abnormal' and cannot, like ‘normal’ people, play guitar, enjoy science fiction, learn a foreign language, talk to us about the latest Woody Allen movie, become a respectable athlete, basketball player or tennis player.

“The Problem of Handicapped Infants”

Both Dawkins and Singer define disabled people as the problem instead of the social interaction with them. That makes their ideas extremely dangerous. The difference with the twitter troll, who was silenced, is that these gentleman lecture all over the world before audiences that include health-professionals, academics, CEO's from health-insurers and pharmaceutical companies, politicians and other policy-makers.

So remember people, you can say hateful things towards people with Down syndrome and even make up theories about how their abortion or death will benefit women and society, as long as you don't swear and have a degree.

Self-advocates on Down syndrome

The voices of people with Down syndrome and their families need to be heard by the same crowd of health-professionals and CEO’s and policy-makers. “Nothing About Us Without Us”, is an important thesis collection of stories from self-advocates with Down syndrome aptly titled. According to research upto 99% of people with Down syndrome are happy with their lives. NINETY-NINE percent are happy! That doesn’t leave much room to ‘increase the sum of happiness’ as Richard Dawkins puts it.

The idea that Down syndrome is an illness has penetrated society. In the video below, actor Pablo Pineda tells why Down syndrome is not an illness and that we all have our limitations. Maybe Pablo can directly explain to Peter Singer that having Down syndrome didn’t hold him back from earning University degrees in Teaching and Educational Psychology. What is really holding people back are low expectations.

Renate Lindeman is mother of two wonderful children with Down, the spokesperson for Downpride and a representative of Saving Down syndrome. Downpride takes the Dutch screening policy to the UN, calling the government initiated extermination of people based on their genes a violation of their human rights.

Please sign the petition to urge the United Nations to remind countries of their obligation to protect the inherent humanity and dignity of all human beings.