The Atlantic shocked readers with a polarizing feature that has been accused of promoting the mass abortion of children who are determined to have Down syndrome through prenatal testing — but others feel the story is an important one that needed to be told.
NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck accused The Atlantic of cheering eugenics “and the murder of people with Down Syndrome, simply because of who God created them to be.”
“Everyone who works there should be ashamed,” Houck wrote.
The story by Sarah Zhang headlined, “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” notes that “Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning.”
The liberal magazine published the story on Wednesday and it will appear in the December print edition. The lengthy story begins by noting that National Down Syndrome Association head Grete Fält-Hansen is regularly asked about raising a child with Down syndrome.
“Sometimes the caller is a pregnant woman, deciding whether to have an abortion. Sometimes a husband and wife are on the line, the two of them in agonizing disagreement,” Zhang wrote. “Once, Fält-Hansen remembers, it was a couple who had waited for their prenatal screening to come back normal before announcing the pregnancy to friends and family. ‘We wanted to wait,’ they’d told their loved ones, ‘because if it had Down syndrome, we would have had an abortion.’”
Zhang continued: “They called Fält-Hansen after their daughter was born—with slanted eyes, a flattened nose, and, most unmistakable, the extra copy of chromosome 21 that defines Down syndrome. They were afraid their friends and family would now think they didn’t love their daughter—so heavy are the moral judgments that accompany wanting or not wanting to bring a child with a disability into the world.”
Read the rest at: Eliminating Down Syndrome
