An Answer Surfaces

There are always unintended consequences:

Women who delay motherhood have led to a sharp rise in the number of babies diagnosed with Down's Syndrome over the past 20 years.
Records show a 71 per cent increase in cases detected in the womb - up from 1,075 in 1989/90 to 1,843 in 2007/8.

My wife, in her younger years, worked with what we refer to today as a Down's syndrome child.

In earlier days, these afflicted children were referred to as "Mongoloid", victims of the Mongolian Syndrome, described as "A child born with a congenital idiocy having the physical characteristics of slanted eyes, a broad short skull, and broad hands with short fingers".(Webster's 1967 Collegiate dictionary)

Today's description of such a child is "A congenital condition characterized by moderate to severe mental retardation, slanting eyes, a broad short skull, broad hands with short fingers, and trisomy of the human chromosome numbered 21 —called also Down's syndrome". (modern on-line Websters)

Same problem , Except today we have a nicer-sounding, more PC name, but it doesn't help the kids with - among other things - such large heads on their small bodies they can't hold them up. Those were the kinds of kids my wife worked with.

A very discouraging job for a young woman. There was no cure, no help and no future for those kids, just a lifetime of dependency. It is no different today. The only solution medical science has come up with is abortion.

My years at the Child Development and Mental Retardation Center at the University of Washington's Medical Research Center exposed me to the reality that many parents of such a child ultimately gave up the child to state care and custody. Sad but true. Most ordinary parents cannot keep up the lifelong and endless total care required, sort of like baby-sitting for life, except that these kids get much more difficult to handle as the years go by.

And now, with the onset of all these "career" women who have been putting off childbirth until their forties, we see a massive rise in this affliction.

Sarah Palin - unfortunately - is the national poster woman for this. She recently had a later-in-life child that suffers from this syndrome. The child, born to Palin in her mid-forties, was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. Palin chose not to abort the baby, an option increasingly being taken by many of today's older couples when prenatal examination exposes a Down' infant.

So. In your forties? Then give the world a break... Don't have kids, unless you are physically and financially prepared to support the possibility of a Down's syndrome child yourself.