Tag Archives: Civil rights for people with Down syndrome

Seen as Sick: Conjuring Illness to Deny Full Humanity

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“Is there a vagina?” I asked the midwife.

After a summer of crop-killing drought, rain fell the day my last child was born. For the first time in two months, we turned off the air conditioning, opened our windows and a soft breeze cleared out the re-circulated air. Sitting on my side of the bed, I looked out the screen door to our veranda while I waited for each contraction, watching the soft rain, breathing in the fragrant storm. When I began to push, just a couple of hours after hard labor had begun, the storm seemed to move with me. Still falling in straight lines, the rain grew heavy and splattered noisily on the heat-hardened ground. Fifteen minutes later the baby emerged, the rain stopped and, as unbelievable as it sounds, the clouds parted just enough for a shaft of sunlight to settle onto the soaked lawn.

My fifth child is my first daughter. Or so the doctors had told me during a level II ultrasound exam eighteen weeks into my pregnancy. But reading an ultrasound is a subjective art and there are no guarantees of the analysis. We knew this.

Because I was 46, I underwent many prenatal tests while expecting my last child. The extensive blood work and high-level ultrasounds did not reveal any abnormalities and when, in my last trimester, I had a fetal echocardiogram, the cardiologist said everything looked beautiful and that beautiful is better than good. Having decided we would not terminate a pregnancy if the fetus had Down syndrome, my partner and I passed on an amniocentesis. Furthermore I believed, whether intuitively or superstitiously, I would lose the baby if I had an amnio. That’s because my grandma, who mothered me unlike anyone else, had four boys because her only daughter died at birth. Grandma had a negative blood type and the blood of her baby girl, her second child, was positive. At the birth of her first child, Grandma’s blood had created antibodies against his positive blood type, which remained in her body and later killed her daughter. Since the 1970s there has been a remedy for this. After each of my babies’ births, for I too have negative blood, I was given a RhoGam shot that prevented my body from building antibodies to positive blood.

Grandma kept trying for a daughter, even when my grandfather did not agree, but only boys came. When I learned my fifth child was female, I believed an amniocentesis would cause me to lose my baby just as the Rh factor took Grandma’s daughter. It isn’t logical, I understand, but I felt very strongly about this connection. I still do.

Bluish and slippery when the midwife handed her to me, the baby screamed long and loudly. Her eyes remained closed as I began nursing her. Her skin pinked up, her umbilical cord was cut and our girl, whom we named Lyra, was perfect. When she finally opened her eyes, I mentioned that they looked “Downsy.” I saw a bulk of skin on the back of her neck, and then the ghostly pallor of her pupils. I mentioned these things to the midwife, who had listened to Lyra’s heart the moment she was born, and she told us she’d fully examine the baby in a bit, to just hold her for a while. In the middle of our bed, Lyra’s father and one of her brothers huddled with me around our new child. The midwife knew. So did my friend who was there to photograph the birth.

My daughter has Down syndrome. And, when she was born, she was blind. The murky white of her pupils, the color of breast milk in a glass bottle, was bi-lateral cataracts. All of which left me to revisit what I thought I desired in a daughter, what it is to have Down syndrome and, ultimately, what it means to be fully human.

The first days of Lyra’s life were filled with appointments: pediatricians, a geneticist, a genetics counselor, two ophthalmologists, and several lab technicians. I did not cry when Lyra’s diagnoses of Down syndrome and cataracts were explained to us, her father and I just pragmatically, if not numbly, proceeded with what we needed to do for our infant. On the weekend after Lyra’s birth, we finally stayed home. Our midwife came to check on us and during her visit my partner drolly mentioned that he had to change all the diapers while I just lazed about. After she left, I told him how embarrassed his stupid diaper joke had made me feel, how I could not believe after a week of traipsing from one specialist to another when I had just given birth that he would call me lazy, even in jest. Anger suffused with pain until hot tears rolled down my face when my rational brain stopped driving my mouth, “And I don’t even have a daughter who will want to do the things mothers and daughters do, like, like go shopping! And what about a wedding? And all those things, school, books, what will we have?”

Right then, just days after her birth, I did not know how having Down syndrome would affect Lyra and nobody could tell me because people with Down syndrome have a wide range of abilities. But only after my bubble of grief had popped open and spilled all over our bedroom could I look at the contents. First of all, what were all these sexist stereotypes I suddenly felt were taken from me? I don’t even like shopping. I’m what I call a “surgical shopper,” I’m in and out, zip-zap, going to the same stores where I know things fit my family. The idea of spending a day shopping makes me glaze over with catatonia. Why did I care about a wedding? I never thought about weddings when my four sons were born. That episode in our bedroom was the first of many installments in which I would question whether I felt a certain way or, later, if Lyra behaved a certain way because (unlike all my other children) she is a girl or because (unlike all my other children) she has Down syndrome. If Lyra had 46 chromosomes, would I have thought, shortly after her birth, about shopping and a wedding? I will never know.

What I do know is that with each newborn a family is reinvented and there is a period of adjustment for all its members. First, a couple becomes parents of an only child. If they carry on and have a second child, the family has an adult to child ratio of 1:1. Should they continue further and have three or more children, the parents are outnumbered and in a whole different league of parenting. Also, with each baby the sibling order is reconfigured. But as both our first girl and a child with multiple diagnoses, I questioned things with Lyra that I had not encountered with my previous newborns. How would having an extra chromosome affect her? How could we make sure any disadvantages or discrimination Lyra might face, as a woman with Down syndrome, not be compounded by the limitations of her vision? The truth is, we have no way of predicting the long-term significance of Down syndrome or bi-lateral cataracts on Lyra’s abilities. In some ways, that has been more unnerving than the diagnoses themselves, a sentiment echoed in one of the first books I read on Down syndrome in which a mother of an older child writes, “I wish I had worried less about who my daughter would become and enjoyed the baby she was.”

Our first two years with Lyra were as though I woke up to find myself unexpectedly enrolled in a graduate program on Down syndrome and, to a lesser degree, vision impairment. Lyra’s father and I have read (often not the same) many books, articles, and blogs on Down syndrome. We began attending different meetings of local support groups, as well as the annual conventions of the National Down Syndrome Congress, conventions that function much like academic conferences. But as a writer, I process life by writing. So, when Lyra was three months old, I began a blog about our entire family, with Lyra as the inevitable focus of most essays. There are now more than fifty of these essays and when I read back I see not just a record of Lyra’s first years, but also my own evolution in understanding Down syndrome.

In one of the first essays, I describe learning about Lyra’s diagnoses and, while we loved her immediately and perhaps with even more ferocity than with our other children, feeling unsettled about how her diagnoses, especially her Down syndrome, would manifest. Months later, I re-read that essay and cringed at two terms I had used, one of which I promptly removed. It was the word “healthy,” which I had used to describe what I had wanted my daughter, in fact all my children, to be. Webster’s defines healthy as “enjoying health and vigor,” with “ill” as the antonym. Webster’s also defines health as “the condition of being sound in body,” with the antonym of “illness.” It is true that anywhere from 40% to 60% of children born with Down syndrome also have heart disease, ranging from holes that close on their own to multiple, severe defects, and we have known far too many children Lyra’s age who have died in their third year of life due to heart conditions. But most children with Down syndrome who have heart disease do not die and instead their hearts are permanently repaired either naturally or surgically. Fortunately for us, the pediatric cardiologist who performed Lyra’s fetal echocardiogram was correct: Lyra’s heart is beautiful and beautiful is better than good. She had a post-natal echocardiogram that once again revealed a perfectly healthy heart.

The other term I cringed at, but left in that early essay, was “milder symptoms,” which I had used to describe what I wished for Lyra. “Milder symptoms” is a legacy of the terms “mildly retarded” and “severely retarded,” both of which were commonly used to discuss people with Down syndrome when I was growing up in the 1970s. Rather than remove the words “milder symptoms” I left them as an example, which I discuss in a separate essay, of how the language regarding Down syndrome has changed rapidly in my lifetime, paralleling all the other changes surrounding the housing, health care, education and integration of people with Down syndrome. In the past twenty years, the word “retarded” has been deemed derogatory in any context. The same needs to happen to the words milder/mildly and severe/severely, comparative words that are routinely assigned to the symptoms of illness including fever, pain, nausea, and rashes (just look to the previous paragraph for an example). They are also used to describe outbreaks such as the annual flu and epidemics of disease. But having a mild or severe case of an extra chromosome is akin to having a mild or severe case of pregnancy. You either do or you don’t; you either are or you aren’t. There is no degree of Down syndrome, just a wide range of abilities exhibited by people with three twenty-first chromosomes. And really, how is that any different than the wide range of abilities exhibited in the population with two twenty-first chromosomes, i.e., “typical” people?

Yes, my daughter has an extra twenty-first chromosome, which certainly has causal impact on who she is, but my daughter is not ill; she is one of the most robustly healthy children I know. At two-and-a-half years of age, Lyra had never needed antibiotics, never had an ear infection, though she had contracted a reasonable number of snotty-nosed colds. She eats, sleeps and energetically plays. When left to her own devices for even a minute, Lyra gets into cupboards, the dog water bowl and, her personal favorite, the bag of paper to be recycled. Just like any toddler. Furthermore, the Ohio government does not consider Down syndrome to be an illness. Since birth, Lyra has had six eye operations (three on each eye). She wears highly specialized contact lenses (charitably made by Bausch + Lomb who make no profit on her rare lenses) for aphakia, or eyes without natural lenses. Her natural lenses were removed when she was six weeks old to eliminate the cataracts and allow her brain to develop as a sighted person. She sees an ophthalmologist on a regular basis and presumably will do so for the entirety of her life. The Ohio Bureau of Children with Medical Handicaps (BCMH) has helped us with the costs related to Lyra’s vision, but they do not cover any expenses related to Lyra’s Down syndrome specifically because it is a condition that can be remediated with interventions. While I can argue that it is in the state’s best interest to insure that early interventions for children Down syndrome, including physical, occupational and speech therapies, occur regularly and with accredited providers, the state has categorized Down syndrome as a disability, not an illness. While they do provide modest, at-home interventions in the first three years of a child’s life, the state primarily uses the public school system to provide services to children with Down syndrome up to the age of twenty-two.

Re-reading what I wrote two years ago, I see the subtle belief I held that Down syndrome was in essence a form of illness, a false belief that is pervasively held. While undeniably used to withhold the status of full humanity to both men and women, the false application of illness has a particularly misogynistic history. Certainly as far back as the Victorian era, illness has been used to depict an idealized form of an adult female. The consumptive woman with luminously pale skin shown reclining, her limp body nearly lifeless, was a mainstay of fin de siècle art and literature. How better to deny full humanity to half of the population than to enlist its complicity to behave as wan and powerless beings in order to attract the other, dominate, half of the population? Nor did that misogynistic cultural norm disappear as each and every wave of feminism washed over society. Like racism, today misogyny is often hidden from open conversation and behavior, only to be expressed in subtler ways. Seeing Lyra’s full humanity requires overcoming not just perceived medical limitations, but deeply rooted social and cultural perceptions too.

If Lyra is not ill, what is she? In the past two generations, children with Down syndrome are experiencing previously unknown levels of intervention, education and rich social lives. This has resulted in an explosion of new statistics. One of the most dramatic is that life expectancy has increased in the past thirty years from 25 to 61 (and continues to rise). Meanwhile, life for people with Down syndrome is radically different than it was in the 1970s. Today, children with Down syndrome go to school, graduate, and some continue on to college or other post-secondary programs. Many adults with Down syndrome are successfully employed, an ever-increasing number are getting married and even, the most surprising to me, driving cars. Living independently as an adult with Down syndrome is now the norm, not the exception.

IMG_1954So are people with Down syndrome different from the rest of us with just 46 chromosomes? Yes, and no. What I have observed in my own child, who is two-and-a-half years old at this writing, is her development is delayed, but in consistent measure. Due to hypotonia, or low muscle tone, a hallmark condition of Down syndrome that is entirely unrelated to cognitive function, Lyra first sat up when she was ten months old. Her brothers all sat up at about six months. She also crawled, and later walked, when she was a year older than her brothers when they achieved these milestones. Hypotonia can also affect the muscles of the mouth. Not unlike trying to speak after being shot up with Novocain, so too can the speech of some people with Down syndrome be harder to understand. And because people commonly assume that poorly articulated speech signifies low cognitive function, it is important to us that Lyra work with a speech therapist, which she has done since she was three months old. An extroverted child who loves to talk, everyone in our family understands Lyra’s speech while other people understand most of what she says, which, again, is little different than most two-year-olds. As Lyra has acquired, one-by-one, the basic skills of living, my fears about my daughter’s abilities have, in equal measure, begun to dissipate. With time, I have come to see that she will get there—“there” being a fully autonomous person—at her own pace, but she will get there.

Yet no matter the successes of Lyra and others liker her, she lives in a society that overwhelmingly treats Down syndrome as an illness, which many people believe should be avoided at all costs. The pervasiveness of this false belief was driven home in the summer of 2014 when evolutionary biologist and ethicist Richard Dawkins tweeted his response to a mother who had asked him what he thought she should do if she discovered the baby she was carrying had Down syndrome: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.” He later defended his tweet by saying to do so would avoid suffering, revealing his utter lack of knowledge about Down syndrome. Clearly Dawkins not only sees Down syndrome as an illness, but he holds the view that people who have an extra twenty-first chromosome are less than fully human. Exposing the tremendous amount of work that needs to be done to educate, well, basically the world. For if an eminent researcher like Richard Dawkins is unaware of the scientific evidence regarding Down syndrome, it troubles me to think what is required to disseminate these facts within the general population.

And, yet, Dawkins’ ignorant tweet was a gift. The response was thunderous and substantial and, as a result, the controversy that ensued reached people who previously knew little or nothing about Down syndrome. Op-ed pieces appeared in newspapers and bloggers wrote about “The Down Syndrome Advantage,” a phrase coined to describe not anecdotal stories, but the scientific evidence regarding Down syndrome, including the following facts:

  • The divorce rate in families with a child with Down syndrome is lower than in families with a child with other congenital abnormalities and in those with a non-disabled child.
  • In a sibling study, 88 percent of the respondents reported feeling that they themselves were better people for having siblings with Down syndrome.
  • Researchers have found that people with Down syndrome have significantly higher “adaptive” skills than their low I.Q. scores might suggest.
  • 99 percent of people surveyed with Down syndrome (284 respondents), including people who are categorized as “medically fragile,” stated that they were personally happy with their own lives.
  • 96 percent of people surveyed with Down syndrome liked the way they looked.

Before I had Lyra, there were things I planned to do if I ever had a daughter. Unlike my own upbringing, which implicitly stressed marrying a financially successful man over all other considerations, I would urge my daughter to find a career path that brought her joy, a sense of fulfillment and financial security. That making a commitment to someone who is financially successful is fine so long as that person truly loves her and makes her happy. To never let someone tell her she could not do something she wanted to do because she is female. That true beauty is derived from respecting and nourishing our bodies, minds and spirits and not to let anything cripple any part of her beautiful being.

The realization I have come to since the early days after Lyra’s birth is that her diagnoses need not change how I have long planned to raise a daughter because there is little, if anything, that Lyra will not be able to do or have simply because she has an extra twenty-first chromosome. What needs to change is the pervasive and radically false notions about Down syndrome that prevent my daughter, and others with Down syndrome, from being treated as fully human.

Part 1: A Painful Week in the Down Syndrome Community

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Real Community, Virtually

When Lyra was four months old, I met a woman at a meeting for new parents of children with Down syndrome. A few weeks later, she sent me an invitation to join a Facebook group titled “(’12/’13) Moms with Kids Rockin’ the Extra Chromosome.” I remember thinking the title was a bit cumbersome, but I don’t recall what I expected when I clicked the “join” button. Not much I suspect for, at first, I hardly looked at or commented on the page. I was busy with my family, my baby and her diagnoses of Down syndrome and bi-lateral cataracts and all the adjustments that go along with any new baby. Today, I have a list of all I did not know or anticipate:

  • I thought the group was local, but it is not. Though most members are Americans, the group has families from all over the world.
  • I had not anticipated the value of an immediate and large group of moms whose kids with Down syndrome were the same age as my child and, therefore, will go through the same stages of development at roughly the same times as my child because…
  • It did not occur to me at first that this would be a lifelong group, but once it did I was floored that something like it hadn’t been created before and reminded that, for all its distractions, the Internet’s impact can be profoundly positive.
  • I could not have imagined how close I would become with some of the other moms. Back in the old days, before Facebook, I never participated in chat rooms. Even today, I do not belong to many Facebook groups. Yet there are women I have only met through this group whom I regularly turn to for input. Recently, one of the moms with whom I corresponded almost daily has largely dropped off due to a difficult pregnancy. I miss her as much as if I had a best friend living next door who moved to another state.
  • I did not know how much I could cherish the children who give us reason to have a Facebook group nor how invested I would feel in their developmental milestones. Videos of crawling, walking, talking, straw-sipping babies have me cheering in my seat at my computer as if I was watching the Chicago Cubs win the World Series.
  • I certainly did not expect my heart to be broken.

Then one week, in June of 2014, three babies died. Baby Fiona died after complications from her second heart surgery. Baby Ryder was fine when he went to bed, had a fever and rash in the morning and was gone by two in the afternoon. And Baby Annie. Baby Annie was not given a heart transplant, for reasons that remain unclear, and her family—mother, father, and two older sisters—have watched her progressively become weaker and bluer. She died early this morning.

Bad things happen all over the world each and every day and it is not humanly possible to feel the appropriate amount of grief for each loss. The deaths of these three babies hits home, however, and I do not recall a week in which I have cried so much and so hard for people I have never met, other than on Facebook.

“Why so many all at once?” my 13-year-old son, Jules, asked me as I wept over Baby Annie’s last photos. I told him I don’t know, but if a heart cannot be fixed, perhaps two years is a typical life expectancy.

The Hearts of Our Children

Forty percent of babies born with Down syndrome have some form of congenital heart disease. Some are easy fixes such as small holes that today can be surgically patched or sometimes even close on their own. Others are severe and may be beyond surgical repair, in which case the only option for survival is a heart transplant.

Baby Annie’s Facebook page stated the only thing that would save Annie’s life was a heart transplant but because she had Down syndrome, she was not placed on the donor list. The outrage of families whose children have DS has been potent. A petition appeared on Change.org asking President Obama to outlaw transplant discrimination for those who have developmental disabilities.

A day or two later, the National Down Syndrome Congress posted the following:

In 1996, Sandra Jensen, a 34-year-old woman with Down syndrome, needed a heart-lung transplant to survive. As far as anyone knew, she would be the first patient with Down syndrome to receive an organ transplant, and initially she was denied. Along with her doctor and her family, Sandra had to fight for the right to receive a transplant. The case gained nationwide attention, arguing that Down syndrome should not be enough to automatically deny a patient a transplant. Sandra won. In January, 1996, she received the requested transplant at Stanford University Medical Center. Her case was seen as a test of whether hospitals could use blanket categories to deny treatment. Since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the establishment of related federal regulations, discrimination against people with disabilities in medical treatment is prohibited.

Today, there is an internet petition (change.org) asking the President of the United States, “Why are children with Down syndrome not considered for organ transplants?” While we love grass roots advocacy, we want to set the record straight by saying it is not true that people with Down syndrome are automatically denied life saving treatment based on their diagnosis of Down syndrome today.

Making decisions around organ transplantation is a terribly complicated process, and the supply of organs for donation is quite limited. People are denied transplants for a variety of reasons. A patient who feels he is being denied solely on the basis of Down syndrome needs to appeal through the hospital system.

Make today the day you sign up to be an organ donor, and help more people receive the organs they desperately need.

Yes, organ transplantation is a complicated process with many factors necessarily taken into consideration. Yet there seems to be ample evidence and agreement that “soft” bigotry exists when it comes to placing a person with a developmental disability on a transplant list. Anecdotally, more than one mom on my Facebook group has had a cardiologist tell her that should all other options fail, a child with DS would not make it on the heart transplant list because a person with a developmental disability cannot be expected to follow through with the extensive post-operative care. (Hello? A two-year-old with or without Down syndrome is not the one responsible for the post-operative care, the caregivers are.) Yes, it is illegal to discriminate but at the end of the day the facts overwhelmingly point to inconsistencies in how doctors decide who to place on the donor lists and given the high proportion of congenital heart defects in children with DS, a disproportionately low number of people with DS make it onto the lists.

When we attended last summer’s NDSC convention, one of the biggest takeaways for me was how so many medical professionals in the United States have arcane and patently wrong notions about what it means to have Down syndrome. In the days after the convention I wrote “Fully Human and in Need of a Civil Rights Movement,” highlighting, in part, the existing discrimination against the developmentally disabled. It has been nearly a year since we attended our first NDSC convention and I have only become more aware and, yes, outraged, at the discrimination against people with developmental disabilities that continues largely unquestioned.

Max, whose professional paths, first as an English professor and later as a lawyer, have made him a stellar researcher, was on the computer until very late last night, trying to make sense of the organ transplant list issues. When he came to bed, he said, “Baby Annie will be the Rosa Parks on this issue, Holly; she will not die in vain.” I hope he is right and that the numerous conversations begun during her prolonged suffering and now, after her death, have infused momentum into individuals, groups, and national organizations to end disability bias in organ transplants.

There are so many details about Baby Annie’s medical journey that are unknown to the public. I read that a national Down syndrome organization was ready to advocate for her to be put on the list until they learned of further medical complications in her case. However, the fact that a national Down syndrome organization has as part of its mission the advocacy of organ transplants for people with DS underscores that soft bigotry is a pervasive and ongoing problem, which kills our children.

What We Can Do

Awareness is the first step to solving any problem. Please share this post, the posts of others and, certainly the articles linked here. And, as always, speak out to your politicians, many of whom may not even be aware a problem exists, just as I was unaware until these sweet babies left us.

Baby Fiona’s family started a wonderful non-profit after one of Fiona’s earlier hospitalizations. Fiona’s Hope Totes are care packages for families experiencing an unexpectedly extended hospital stay with a sick child. As of now, I believe the program is just in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota where Fiona lived with her family. I can easily imagine it becoming a national non-profit. Please consider donating to this charity to honor Fiona and help other families as they face medical odysseys.

Baby Annie was in hospice care for the last several weeks, surrounded by her family, who needless to say, did not leave her side. A fundraiser has been established to help her family. Please consider contributing to this family who has loved so hard and suffered so deeply.

And, finally, please, please, please become an organ donor today, if you have not already.

(Kimchilatkes I miss your sagacious ability to tease through complicated issues now more than ever. Your voice is sorely missed and will return, I hope, very soon.)

Lyra’s Latest: Fully Human & Needing a Civil Rights Movement

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Your daughter was born with Down syndrome. Do not expect her to read, write, do math or ever drive a car.

A physician said these words to the parents of a buoyant baby girl, aptly named Grace, in the days after her birth at UC Davis Medical Center. It sounds like something a doctor might have said in the 1960s. But in fact those words were spoken in August of 2012, the same month that our daughter, Lyra, was born. The parents who were told this spent the first months of their daughter’s life in a gloomy fog, bereft because of what they were told not to expect.

Too many physicians, people whose job it is to know the latest research and trends, do not understand the realities of a Down syndrome diagnosis but instead cling to limiting portrayals. Why is that? That falsehoods regarding a diagnosis of DS are tenaciously held and promulgated by anyone, but especially health care professionals, needles me as I try to understand why. The only explanation I’ve come up with is that it is still acceptable to discriminate against this specific population.

Which is why we need organizations like the National Down Syndrome Congress.

Driving to Denver: Our First National Down Syndrome Congress Convention

While always a resource for information, support and research, the primary function of the non-profit NDSC is holding the annual convention. For two and a half days, sessions are held addressing they myriad challenges families of people with Down syndrome face, as well as sessions for people with DS themselves, at different ages and developmental stages. Many families come every year and one such veteran of the convention, a mother from Arkansas, recommended we stick to the sessions that relate to our child’s age.

Max and I, both incurable students, were eager to attend but the roughly 1400-mile drive might have been a deal breaker if the destination were not Denver. The fact that Max’s sisters and their families live just outside of Denver sealed the deal. And so, taking ten-month-old Lyra,  3-year-old Leif and and thirteen-year-old Jules, who helped navigate and keep the babies happy, I drove to Denver. Max flew out two days after we left, yet arrived six hours before we did.

Shared Fear

The first session we attended was on speech development. Even though it was four and a half hours long, it was heavily attended. Primarily an overview of the benefits of early and ongoing speech therapy for children with a diagnosis of DS, for me the highlight of the presentation was a short video. In it, five young women with Down syndrome were interviewed. Sitting at a table together, they discussed their training—two women were certified pre-school childcare assistants, having taken 90 hours of training at their local community college—and their careers. They talked about boyfriends and parties. Easily understandable, their language was rich and their conversational styles flowed naturally and comfortably.

At a break, I began talking with the families around me. They, like me, want their children to speak clearly and fluidly. “People judge intelligence by speech, it’s not fair, but they do,” said one father, distilling one of my greatest fears about my daughter’s Down syndrome in one short sentence. The truth of his statement was like a figurine on a revolving dais spinning slowly in the middle of our conversation. That some people with DS have difficulty speaking may not be reflective of their cognitive abilities, but rather due to physical challenges including hypotonic mouth muscles and the forward placement of the tongue. This fact is not widely understood by the general population. Instead, those who speak unclearly, or not at all, are deemed ignorant and too often are dismissed as valid members of society.

Multiple Intelligences

In 1983, Howard Gardner’s book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, broke down general intelligence in humans to these eight modalities:

  • Linguistic intelligence
  • Logical-mathematical intelligence
  • Musical intelligence
  • Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence
  • Spatial intelligence
  • Interpersonal intelligence
  • Intrapersonal intelligence

In our society, general intelligence is primarily understood by the strength of someone’s linguistic intelligence and logical-mathematical intelligence. College entrance exams exclusively test these two modalities, which also happen to be the two most challenging modalities of intelligence for people with a diagnosis of Down syndrome.

On the other hand, it has been repeatedly shown that many people with DS are hyper-social and hyper-sensitive, that is, they have strong interpersonal intelligence. And many folks in the DS community joke that the 21st chromosome is the “music” chromosome as singing, dancing and listening to music are passions of a significant number of people with DS. Our own girl loves her music-man brother, Hugo. When she is fussy, Hugo often takes her to the living room and plays the guitar or piano while singing, just for her. She instantly quiets and remains content for as long as he makes music. She does not, however, fall asleep while her personal minstrel plays for her.

Nobody Walks in L.A.

When we weren’t in sessions, Max and I walked around the exhibit hall pushing Lyra in her stroller. There were things to buy like eyeglasses and clothing specifically designed to fit people with DS. We purchased a speech therapy kit for Lyra that includes several straws, to be introduced at graduating levels because, unlike a bottle or sippy cup, when drinking from a straw, the tongue naturally moves to the back of the mouth. I spoke at length with a remarkable young couple, Tim and Liz Plachta, who have created a post-secondary scholarship fund for people with Down syndrome.  Ruby’s Rainbow is named for their young daughter who has a diagnosis of DS.

At a table for Adam’s Camp, a program in the Rocky Mountains where five therapists work with five kids for five days to get a boost in therapy goals, we met a father whose child with DS was ten years old. No longer in shock and overwhelmed, like so many of the parents there with babies, this dad was relaxed. As he chatted with us, his three children crowded around Lyra’s stroller, making her smile and clap. He told me he and his wife plan their yearly vacations around two things: a week at Adam’s Camp for their son with Down syndrome (while his siblings are at the typical camp on the same YMCA campus) and the NDSC convention.

“You know, we came the first time to the convention when our boy was just a baby, just like your little girl there, and the keynote speaker was this woman from LA. She was an actress with Down syndrome and I recognized her from TV shows she’d been on. She also worked in an office and drove there in her convertible BMW. In L.A. That changed everything for us, like how we think about our son and his life. So we’ve been back every year since then.”

Unlike the actress with Down syndrome, I’m not so sure I can drive in L.A., where the traffic is notoriously congested and the drivers are, even more notoriously, aggressive.

The Goal of Therapies

Shortly after Lyra was born, our local support group gave us a copy of the book, Gross Motor Skills in Children with Down Syndrome by Patricia Winders. Ms. Winders was at the convention and presented one session for pre-walkers and another for children who are already walking. Max and I both went to the session on pre-walkers and I am glad we did. After breaking down the early stages of gross motor skills into five stages, she asked for baby volunteers and chose Lyra to demonstrate Stage 3. While she sits up quite solidly now, Lyra does not put her arms out to catch herself if she tips over and, as a result, we cannot leave her alone sitting up unless she is on a padded surface. Ms. Winders had Lyra doing any number of seemingly impossible tasks in no time flat.

A toddler's pronated foot
A toddler’s pronated foot

That was thrilling, but what stuck with me the most from that session was the feet of another child. They haunt me. With their lax ligaments, children with Down syndrome can easily develop pronated feet if they do not receive early interventions. Stage 4 was demonstrated by a two-year-old girl, who has been “cruising” furniture for a few months but was not yet walking independently. This small child’s ankles bulged over her instep while her toes splayed sideways looking almost like fins.

“Has anyone recommended she use Sure Step braces?” asked Ms. Winders.

“I took her to the orthopedic surgeon,” said the girl’s mother, “and he just said, ‘She has Down syndrome; she’ll walk funny,’ and he didn’t want to do surgery.” It doesn’t take a doctor to see that the girl’s feet would eventually cause her pain from the completely avoidable malformation that was occurring. This mother was not derelict; she had taken her child to a specialist. The doctor’s attitude is reprehensible, if not malpractice.

Patrica Winders rolled her eyes and told the mom to get her daughter in Sure Step braces, not something like Sure Steps, but precisely that brand. And she stated to the entire audience the same point that the speech therapists we’d listened to had told us in other sessions:

The goal of early interventions is not to speed up the achievement of developmental milestones; the goal is to learn the skills correctly, which is much easier to do than it is to unlearn incorrect patterns that a child has developed as compensatory techniques.

Breaking News and Controversy: To Have DS or Not? That Is the Question.

In the middle of the convention, I received a text message from my friend Mariko, whom I have known since high school. Mariko’s text had a link to this Boston Globe article in which researchers have been able to “turn off” the extra 21st chromosome in cells taken from a man with Down syndrome. The application of this research is a long way from being determined.

To be able to end or remediate the medical complications and the cognitive limitations many people with Down syndrome face may seem to many, at first blush, a no-brainer. But I felt stopped in my tracks. The NDSC mantra is “More Alike than Different” and their work in educating society and supporting families encourages an attitude of integrating, not marginalizing, people with Down syndrome. There are many slogans on things from T-shirts, to Facebook groups (including one I belong to), and the aforementioned non-profit, Ruby’s Rainbow, that refer to Down syndrome as “rocking the 21st chromosome.” So what does it mean if somewhere down the road the medical technology exists to eliminate the effects of that very chromosome?

In the days since I first heard of this new research, voices have piped up to state that this would be akin to cultural genocide, including this Canadian woman whose daughter has DS:

We’ve got a genetically similar community, visible minority who are being targeted and terminated globally. People think, Well, this is the way it is and these people just shouldn’t be.

This news initiated one of the most achingly honest conversations I have read on a social media Down syndrome support group. Generally, the comments on that group are full of cheers for each others’ children as they master some milestone or another. And just as often, words of comfort are given, and prayers offered, when families post about set backs or serious medical interventions, such as open-heart surgery. The idea of “turning off” the extra 21st chromosome strikes this chord with so many families: It is offensive that people do not accept our children the way that they are, but it is also true that our children struggle greatly not only with health issues but also learning their basic gross and fine motor skills, speech and hosts of other things that we in the “typical community” take for granted. People with Down syndrome may be more alike than different from people without an extra 21st chromosome, but their successes often come due to intensive interventions and plain old work. Hard work.

And after all that work, even if a child with Down syndrome grows into the most independent, successful adult, what awaits is a cruel sentence. Alzheimer’s is not a matter of if, but when. All adults with Down syndrome begin manifesting the physical pathology of Alzheimer’s in their forties. 80% will go on to develop dementia. And, yes, there was a session at the NDSC convention on this subject.

Again, what we don’t know is what this latest research will bring to bear on the lives of today’s children with a diagnosis of Down syndrome. Research on Down syndrome, and the attendant complications, is being conducted worldwide. At the NDSC convention, Lyra gave saliva samples to a scientist studying autoimmune disorders in Down syndrome (Lyra’s hypothyroidism is considered an autoimmune disorder) at the Linda Crnic Institute for Down Syndrome.

What Does it Mean to Have Down Syndrome?

If someday there is a medical way to “turn off” the extra 21st chromosome, I suspect that the Down syndrome community will treat it similarly to the way the Deaf community has responded to cochlear implants as described in this article:

The conflict concerning cochlear implants is centered on the definition of disability. If deafness is defined as a disability, as it is from the medical view, it is something to be altered and repaired. On the other hand, if deafness is defined as a cultural identity, it should be allowed to thrive and, given the emphasis on diversity in today’s society, should be readily accepted and supported. Therefore, although the controversy over cochlear implantation seems simple, it is based on the very complicated and often unstated implications of the true meaning of deafness.

I don’t know what we, or Lyra herself, would one day choose to do. Of course I would want to spare my child the suffering of early onset Alzheimer’s, but everything about my daughter’s diagnosis of Down syndrome has caused me to rethink so much of what I once assumed.

Ask Them

The bigger question is whether having Down syndrome is such a bad thing. Yes, all the medical and health issues suck, suck, suck. If I could wave a wand and take away all the attendant medical issues that come with Down syndrome, I would. Without hesitation.

But consider this: People with Down syndrome are vastly happier than people without Down syndrome. Physician and researcher Brian Skotko published the following findings:

  • 99 percent of adults with Down syndrome reported feeling happy with their lives
  • Another 97 percent said they liked who they were and
  • 96 percent liked the way they looked

Furthermore:

  • 97 percent of siblings ages 12 and older expressed feelings of pride about their brother or sister with Down syndrome and
  • 88 percent were convinced they were better people because of their sibling with Down syndrome

The Cost of Ignorance: Justice for Ethan Sayer

In Maryland last January, a young man with Down syndrome tried to watch Zero Dark Thirty for a second time in a movie theater before buying a second ticket (his family believes, based upon his phone record, that he was trying to do so with his cell phone). Three sheriff’s deputies, who were working mall security, brutally apprehended Ethan Saylor for this offense. Mr. Saylor’s caregiver was present and told the officers not to touch her client because it would escalate things. She was right. It did.

Instead of treating him like they would any other adult human, intead of listening to the simple advice of his care giver, instead of using training they claimed to have received for dealing with people with developmental disabilities, the sheriff’s deputies assaulted Ethan Saylor. And instead of watching Zero Dark Thirty at the time it was scheduled, the other audience members witnessed the beginnings of a murder. After being dragged out of their view, audience members report hearing Mr. Saylor cry, “I want my mommy!” as he was shoved to the floor, handcuffed and, according to the medical examiner who conducted his autopsy, asphyxiated. His death was ruled a homicide

In January of 2013, in the United States, a man with Down syndrome was murdered by the authorities. For a movie ticket? No, for being different.

In the community of families that include someone with a diagnosis of Down syndrome, we are all Ethan Saylor’s family. His murder is the worst fear of a parent with a child who has DS. I believe Ethan would not have been murdered had he been a man without Down syndrome.

IMG_2087I met Ethan’s mother and sister at the NDSC convention. Hardly their first time at the convention, they’ve been regular attendees since Ethan was Lyra’s age. They had a table set up with buttons. I took several. They had photos of Ethan from the time he was a baby, with tufty blonde hair, to his high school graduation. And they had displayed his collection of police and military paraphernalia—badges, patches, hats. Ethan, I learned from his sister, was a big fan of the police and military. One of their biggest.

I talked with his sister, a pretty woman in her twenties with blonde hair framing her face in soft ringlets and blue eyes that held my gaze while we spoke. She told me that the moms of kids with Down syndrome who have been keeping up the pressure, particularly in the blogosphere, have sustained Ethan’s family as they seek justice. It hasn’t come easily. The Sheriff’s department investigated its own officers and found no need to press charges. After the release of the Sheriff’s report, witnesses to the murder have contacted the family to tell them the report was inaccurate.

The Washington Post reported last week that, “with good reason, the Justice Department is now investigating the incident as a civil rights case.”

The NDSC Takeaway

Max and I learned so much at the National Down Syndrome Congress convention about how we can help our daughter realize her full potential. We found information, support, community and tools to help us be the parents she needs us to be.

But all we learned was not bright. We learned how far our society is from treating as fully human those who have a diagnosis of Down syndrome. From baby Grace, born in a modern hospital affiliated with a major university, whose life doctors summarily dismissed her life as having any potential, to Ethan Saylor, dying at the hands of the officers sworn to protect him as a citizen.

Next year’s NDSC convention will be in nearby Indianapolis in early July. If you’ve ever been interested in attending, I strongly encourage you to do so. You’ll find us there.