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George Will on son Jon Will’s 40th Birthday

May 5, 2012

By Dave Andrusko

Jon Will, who turns 40 this week, demonstrates how it’s possible to live with Down syndrome and live well.

George Will’s column this week on the 40th birthday of his son, Jon, is so wonderful we’re running two items on NRL News Today: Wesley Smith’s always superb observations (“Jon Will’s Gift to Us All”) and some thoughts from yours truly.

I suspect Will’s wonderfully loving tribute to Jon reminds many veteran pro-lifers of some of the same things it brought to my mind when I read his column.

Gosh, Jon is forty years old! Where did the time go? We ran I believe it was Will’s first column about Jon many, many years ago in National Right to Life News. I freely confess I knew very little about Down syndrome in those days. I was not alone. Will reminds us in his Wednesday column that “In 1972, people with Down syndrome were still commonly called Mongoloids.”

Thank goodness we have moved passed that. If only at the same time we’ve forgone dehumanizing language—and seen the life expectancy of children born with Down syndrome climb from 20 years to 60 years—we’d not also witnessed what Will properly calls “moral regression.”

Will reminds us of two developments that would forever alter the lives of children prenatally diagnosed with various disabilities.

“Jon was born just 19 years after James Watson and Francis Crick published their discoveries concerning the structure of DNA, discoveries that would enhance understanding of the structure of Jon, whose every cell is imprinted with Down syndrome. Jon was born just as prenatal genetic testing, which can detect Down syndrome, was becoming common. And Jon was born eight months before Roe v. Wade inaugurated this era of the casual destruction of pre-born babies.”

As NRL News Today readers know, 90% of babies found to have Down syndrome are aborted. Ninety percent! There are many explanations, besides the fact that sophisticated tests can target these babies earlier and earlier in their prenatal development. Wills offers one.

“This era has coincided, not just coincidentally, with the full, garish flowering of the baby boomers’ vast sense of entitlement, which encompasses an entitlement to exemption from nature’s mishaps, and to a perfect baby. So today science enables what the ethos ratifies, the choice of killing children with Down syndrome before birth.”

Fortunately, for the entire Will family, his parents greeted Jon’s birth with equanimity. They saw him for what Jon was: a member of their family.

“The day after Jon was born, a doctor told Jon’s parents that the first question for them was whether they intended to take Jon home from the hospital. Nonplussed, they said they thought that is what parents do with newborns. Not doing so was, however, still considered an acceptable choice for parents who might prefer to institutionalize or put up for adoption children thought to have necessarily bleak futures. Whether warehoused or just allowed to languish from lack of stimulation and attention, people with Down syndrome, not given early and continuing interventions, were generally thought to be incapable of living well, and hence usually did not live as long as they could have.”

The bizarre contradiction still stuns me. Tripling the lifespan of children with Down syndrome, far, far more educational opportunities, a much more welcoming attitude—at the same time nine out of ten babies with Down syndrome never get the chance to reach birth, let alone 60.

I should not have, I suppose, but I took a moment to see the response of the usual subjects, including “Feminists for Choice.” There “Sarah” rants against Will’s “blatantly ant-choice” column where he is hammered for “shoehorning in a slam against private medical decisions” rather than “sharing his unique perspective on parenting a child with special needs, and the challenges and joys that that brings.”

She has, of course, missed the whole point, which includes that every year there are fewer and fewer special needs kids to parent. My family is filled with educators, including two of my daughters who teach kids with much more severe disabilities than Jon’s. It is impossible to miss how much smaller the population of kids with Down syndrome is today than it was 20 years ago.

Last point. Will emphasizes a theme he has repeated more than once, one that moves me every time I read it. Jon’s life has been made immeasurably more enjoyable by the “kindness of strangers,” especially athletes.He writes

“The [baseball] players, who have climbed to the pinnacle of a steep athletic pyramid, know that although hard work got them there, they have extraordinary aptitudes because they are winners of life’s lottery. Major leaguers, all of whom understand what it is to be gifted, have been uniformly and extraordinarily welcoming to Jon, who is not.”

If not only “Sarah” but all of us could see how much more decent a human being we become by extending that kindness not only to strangers, but to those who ought to be most familiar: our own children.

You can see a gallery of photos of Jon and the Will family.

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Categories: Down Syndrome