–Ah, now it all makes sense.

Everyone else, thanks so much for so thorough a discussion of these questions — it’s really not a cliché to say that there aren’t any easy answers here, and the more considerations one brings to the table, from maternal age to number of siblings to the ethics of employer-provided health insurance to the kinds of disabilities one can and can’t imagine dealing with, the more complex everything gets. It’s worms all the way down. (And how the hell did I forget about ADHD? Yet another thing screening won’t catch!) But right now, Jamie and I are packing up to go to SeaWorld in Orlando, because that’s my way of thanking him for sitting through a long afternoon of hearing his father talk about academic freedom during a visit to Stetson University in Deland. See you all next weekend!

I think this speaks not to NWHiker’s bigotry, but to a broken system in our country. We don’t have a decent social safety net. We don’t have affordable health care. We don’t offer the kinds of resources that many people with disabilities need, and so the burden of providing those resources falls entirely on the family of that person.

In high school, I volunteered with profoundly disabled students — not kids with mild or moderate Down syndrome, but students who were unable to speak, move, etc. They had varying mental capacities, from the student who was mentally fully-functioning but trapped in a body which would not allow him to speak or move more than one arm to the students who had very little mental an physical functioning skills. A special bus drove the entire class, minus one student, back and forth to school every day, because they all lived in the same state-run home. At least one student was in his 20s.

That is the unfortunate reality of disability in our country. No, it’s not the story that all people with disabilities have, but the truth is that raising a disabled child can be extraordinarily difficult, and many profoundly disabled children end up as wards of the state. I’m not comfortable demonizing individuals who are honest with themselves in recognizing that they would not handle, or would not want to handle, parenting a disabled kid.

That said, I would like to think that if I had a wanted pregnancy and found out that the child would have Down syndrome, I would choose to give birth and raise that child anyway. But that’s because I’ve had lots of interactions with people who have Down syndrome, and I think it’s something that I could handle. I’m not sure, though, that I could be a good parent to a child with the kind of profound disabilities that the students I worked with had, even though they were wonderful, unique, kind, funny people.

Perhaps that makes me a bigot, too. It’s not that I think disabled people shouldn’t be born or that disabled people automatically have a lower quality of life than “normal” people or that “normal” even means anything at all. But I think we’re going down the wrong path when we start attacking women for the reasons they terminate their pregnancies, instead of attacking the social conditions which influence those decisions.

And there are women out there who would terminate a pregnancy if they found out the fetus had some sort of abnormality even if all the best social structures were in place. I haven’t been in her shoes. I can’t tell her that she’s bigoted or selfish or wrong for making that decision.

Whatever Jamie Bérubé’s existence brings to the world must be worth an order of magnitude more than you have so far…