While this blog is usually reserved for the occasional posts I am able to write, I wanted to share about an exciting opportunity I have received. With the Christmas season quickly approaching, I have had the privilege of writing this year’s advent devotional for Well-Watered Women. Before I share a little about this advent, I wanted to first give insight into the vision behind it.
I can still recall the conversation with vivid details. I sense the pounding of my broken heart and remember the confusion in my muddled mind. I hear my weary voice as it trembles, and my body literally feels the heavy weight of physical grief as I remember my words.
With the title, “Is Iceland on Track to Eliminate Down Syncrome,” CBS news created a firestorm over this past week within the Down syndrome community around the world. Explaining that this near extinction of a people group has occurred through the use of a now popular and easy to use prenatal test, known as the NIPT, the news clip touches on the ethics and morality of using technology to select what type of people are born. Should parents have the right to choose whether or not they bring their baby into the world?
It is a noisy time in which we live, and countless voices drift throughout our days and our nights. Unless we are among the most disciplined of people, the moments have become rare when we allow our souls the rest and quiet that they so desperately need.
Instead, we consume. More and more, deeper and deeper, we fill the seconds and minutes and hours of our days with voices, words, images, messages. Often, we don’t even recognize that the media we consume is not only providing our entertainment, but feeding our affections.
When we first found ourselves navigating the world of Down syndrome, I had no idea what I was doing. I came to the table with very little factual knowledge on Down syndrome and quite a lot of preconceived notions and outdated cultural stereotypes. Through the course of time and the process of educating ourselves, my family has been able to put to rest many misguided beliefs that drove our fears and provoked our insecurities. I have come to realize that a diagnosis of Down syndrome does not mean life will be horrible; it is not the ultimate dream-crusher that I originally assumed it would be.
Recently, I read a story about a baby boy born in 1982, known to us only as Baby Doe. Interestingly, this baby who had no name quickly became the center of national debate over the sanctity of human life.
In the court of public opinion, some found this newborn baby boy to be guilty of two grave offenses. First, he had Down syndrome. Somehow, he had managed to breeze through pregnancy without being detected, thus taking away his parents’ ability to abort him in the womb. Second, he was born with a (surgically correctable) condition known as tracheoesophagael fistual. Yet while a nearby hospital and its medical team were ready and willing to perform surgery on him, Baby Doe’s parents chose instead to follow the archaic and biased advice of the mother’s obstetrician…and they did nothing.
