This column was published on Ohio.com on May 6, 2017. One column only scratches the surface on the topic of life with Down syndrome in the United States in 2017. For more articles, videos and profiles of adults with Down syndrome, please refer to my public Facebook page, “Whoopsie Piggle,” or my blog of the same name on WordPress.
Two women walk into two separate pediatric medical genetics offices. Both are told by genetics counselors that they are carrying fetuses with Down syndrome and not to expect their children to function beyond the abilities of a 6-year-old child. Ever.
When and where did this happen? The United States in the 1950s? A former Soviet bloc country in the present day?
No. This happened in 2017 at University Hospitals and the Cleveland Clinic. No joke.
Every September since our daughter Lyra was born, I’ve spoken to first-year medical students at Case Western Reserve University. Too early into their medical educations to know what medical specialty they will ultimately practice, these students are the ideal audience.
Why? Because health care professionals in all specialties need to hear this: People with Down syndrome are fully human and today lead lives little different than the students themselves.
One day those students may be the gatekeepers for who receives care, or who even exists. Therefore, unlike far too many of today’s health care professionals, they need to give information based not on assumptions or on outdated and false stereotypes, but on facts. After all, medicine is a science, and science is founded on the pursuit of facts.
So let’s go over some facts:
• Most people with Down syndrome (DS) are born with a mild to moderate intellectual disability, according to the National Down Syndrome Society, which is to say most will function at levels considerably higher than that of a 6-year-old.
• People with Down syndrome have been found in clinical studies to have significant adaptive skills, allowing them to function at levels higher than expected based upon IQ alone.
• Increasingly, children with Down syndrome go to school, graduate from high school and go on to post-secondary education, including college. Many will drive, get jobs, live independently and marry.
• In a study in which people with Down syndrome over age 12 were asked to weigh in, “nearly 99 percent of people with DS indicated that they were happy with their lives, 97 percent liked who they are, and 96 percent liked how they look. Nearly 99 percent of people with DS expressed love for their families, and 97 percent liked their brothers and sisters. While 86 percent of people with DS felt they could make friends easily, those with difficulties mostly had isolating living situations.”
And what of the families? More facts:
• The incidence of divorce is lower in families with a child who has Down syndrome than in families who have children with other disabilities and, get this, families whose children are all nondisabled, according to the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.
• In a study of older siblings of a person with Down syndrome, 94 percent expressed feelings of pride for their sibling with DS, and 88 percent cited that they are better people for having a sibling with DS. I venture it’d be hard to replicate those numbers among families with just typical children.
The “Down syndrome advantage” is a phrase that has been coined in light of these and many similar studies. And from my own nonscientific research, confessions of a grandchild with DS being their grandparents’ favorite is so common, it’s almost unanimous.
Yes, challenges exist for parents raising a child with Down syndrome. About half of babies born with DS have congenital heart defects, though most are corrected completely with surgery. Also, most children with DS are born with low muscle tone, which not only results in delayed gross motor skills (sitting up, crawling, walking) and fine motor skills (eating with utensils, self-dressing, writing), it also impacts speech. Our daughter Lyra has been in speech therapy most of her life and may well continue throughout her life.
But there has never been a better time to be born with Down syndrome, at least in most parts of the United States and many other countries, though not all.
So why do so many medical providers persist in sharing horridly inaccurate opinions, as opposed to the facts, as shown in scientific research, when delivering a diagnosis of Down syndrome? I believe this is mostly a generational issue. I cannot recall meeting or hearing of a health care professional under age 40 who is negatively biased towards people with DS.
In fact, among women receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, the number who choose to terminate has decreased slightly in recent years, according to a study published in the journal Prenatal Diagnosis. The presumption is that today’s young women, unlike my generation, grew up seeing people with DS on television, as well as knowing people with DS in their schools and communities. Firsthand exposure to people with DS is the antidote to the biased notion that people in this population cannot function beyond the level of a 6-year-old.
The summer Lyra turned 2, we went to a family-friendly party in a sprawling yard. I had a fabulous conversation with a smart and funny woman my age. Nearby, Lyra was hustling about in her newly perfected bear walk.
“She’s so cute, how she crawls on her hands and feet,” said the woman.
“Yeah, it takes them much longer to crawl and walk with Down syndrome.”
“Wait, your daughter has Down syndrome?”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“You are so much stronger than I could have been,” the woman said and I disagreed with her. “No,” she continued, “I’m telling you that you are stronger than I was. In my late 30s, I was still single and had IVF to get pregnant. When I was pretty far along, they told me the baby had Down syndrome and gave me two days to decide. I couldn’t do it. I would have been alone, I … I didn’t do it.”
“I have no judgment,” I said, knowing this woman made the best decision she could with the information she was given. I then watched the features on her face rearrange themselves, her eyes going from narrowed and intense to wide and open.
“But I see your daughter and,” she paused, “it makes me wonder.”
I gave her my card, but not surprisingly, I never heard from her. In less than two minutes, I watched a woman think she could not possibly have raised a child with Down syndrome to wondering deeply, perhaps painfully, what her life might really have been like with a child who had Down syndrome. All the wonderful possibilities, along with manageable challenges, that her health care professionals neglected to tell her.
Contact Holly Christensen at whoopsiepiggle@gmail.com.
Whoopsie Piggle 