Sarah Palin’s Baby and the Rights of the Disabled

Pajamas Media ^ | September 3, 2008 | Bridget Johnson

[AJKauf]

The VP pick's decision to raise a Down Syndrome baby should spark a debate on the value of "imperfect" human beings.

When Adolf Hitler set about his plans to craft the perfect, master Aryan race, his first task was to eliminate the handicapped and mentally disabled; as the first step in this goal, midwives and physicians were ordered to register children born with severe birth defects, and “experts” reviewing the cases ordered the deaths of about 5,000 such children from 1939 to 1945. The vulnerable in our society are the canary in the coal mine: When society decides that any sector of the population is less worthy of protection, less deserving of life than another, we teeter over the edge into an abyss of inhumanity.

Ronald Reagan saw this acutely in 1982....

[BossLady]

Great article! I was talking about this over the weekend about the elephant in the room....meaning....how no one is talking about the obvious fact.....Palin can continue to go forward with more reforms and such for children and infants with disabilities that are denied care by insurance companies, hospitals and other agencies.

"Reagan was so affected by the Bloomington case that he sprang into action twofold: directing the departments of Justice and Health and Human Services to enforce civil rights laws when it came to care and protection of disabled infants, requiring hospitals that received federal funding to post notices advising it was against federal law to deny nutrition to handicapped newborns; and penning a stirring article, unsolicited, for the Human Life Review’s Spring 1983 issue, in which he summed up the tragic “Baby Doe” case: “Retardation was the equivalent of a crime deserving the death penalty.”

[Raymann]

I do applaud her but she should have known better then to have a kid at her age.

[BossLady]

We have a lot of patients at our office who have babies in their 40s that are perfectly fine. Many of those babies were obviously a surprise....but all loved and that is what is important ;)

[Raymann]

I know most of the babies would be fine but the risks increase significantly once a mother reaches Palin’s age.

[BossLady]

I am aware of all this....however, there are a lot of what Docs call ‘menopause babies’.....not planned. Out of the 12 or so babies of patients in their 40’s.....ZERO have Down’s Syndrome. In fact, the only Down’s baby we have ever treated has been from a woman in her 20s.

[TASMANIANRED]

It’s a great article.