Katie in Ann Arbor, Mother of Down Syndrome Daughter
November 14, 2006
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Katie in Ann Arbor, Michigan, it's nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Rush, it is so amazing to talk to you. I'm gonna faint!
RUSH: (laughing)
CALLER: I won't do that, I promise. I'm not usually nervous, but I have a magic wand. I can grant you the power to be able to speak about this subject, because I am a mother with a child with disabilities and Down syndrome, and other disabilities as well, so, bringggg! You now have the authority to speak on it.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: My point was, I kind of resent the notion that you have to be going through it or be a parent of somebody with disabilities in order to be able to speak about it or have an opinion because that presumes that there's no absolute or objective truth about the dignity of the human person.
RUSH: Exactly right. Let me tell you why it is. By the way, if you're just joining us, about an hour ago we were discussing latest genetics research and discoveries in Great Britain, and something I predicted many, many years ago -- 14, 15 years ago -- going to be able to go to the doctor and the doctor is going to be able to run some tests and tell you your kid's going to have freckles, prone to overweight, maybe some red hair. "I don't want that kind of child! I wouldn't want to do that to a child," and they've been able to screen over 200 diseases and disabilities and they have a quote from a mother who allowed her embryo to be aborted, child to be aborted because of what she was told were diseases that the child might get, and she said, "Until you have been in the situation where you've had to care for a disabled and diseased child, you have no right to comment on it."
I said, "This is typical." We just went through a campaign in this country where that was one of the central themes. We went through it in 2002 or 2004 with Christopher Reeve. We keep going through this. The reason they say that, Katie, is because they know what they're doing is wrong, and they feel guilty about it, and they don't want to be reminded. So they just don't want to hear anything that will make them feel uncomfortable and increase their guilt. It's a form of censorship in a way and it's a of speech suppression, but it's all based on these people who: they know what they're doing, and they don't feel right about it, so they want to sound as though they're really magnanimous and smarter than the rest of us. They don't want to hear anybody who disagrees, just make them feel worse. Katie, hang on. Don't go away here.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We go back to Katie in Ann Arbor. I asked you to hold on because I wasn't sure that you got to finish what you wanted to say and I didn't want to rudely disconnect you there when I had so usurped so much of your precious time by explaining your question.
CALLER: You're very generous. Thank you.
RUSH: You're welcome.
CALLER: The other part of this was, you know, if there's an absolute dignity to a human person, you have to have your convictions of what's true before in the middle of the situation. When my husband and I found out, we knew at about 22 weeks that our daughter had a severe cardiac defect, and a high likelihood of Down syndrome. We knew it was about a 50-50 chance of Down syndrome, which is very high. It was devastating. We have three other very healthy children and we were just blindsided by it. What was so upsetting was, "Well, what's ahead? What am I going to have to do? How is our life going to change? What are our sacrifices?" But that didn't really matter. I mean, yeah, that was the emotion of the moment, but we don't make decisions based on that. You make decisions based on, "This is our daughter and we're going to take care of her and do whatever we need to do," and she's been through two open heart surgeries. She eats entirely pretty much -- very little orally, mostly by the feeding tube. She just had eye and ear surgery yesterday, and she will likely have another heart surgery.
RUSH: Whoa.
CALLER: It's amazing they can do these things.
RUSH: How old is your daughter?
CALLER: She's 14 months.
RUSH: Wow!
CALLER: She's 14 months.
RUSH: Wow! What's the prognosis?
CALLER: Well, there's two parts of it. With this particular cardiac defect she had, kids who don't have Down syndrome right now with the surgeries that are now available -- and just by chance we happened to live in the city where more of these surgeries are done than anywhere else in the world, so we were very lucky to be close to the world experts on this. But there are only kids around now who are teenagers. Fifteen years ago all they would have been able to say is, "We're sorry," and she would have died. So the prognosis for these kids looks pretty good, but they don't have any who are grown adults.
Do they need heart transplants later? She has basically only half of a heart so they had to rework the whole plumbing of her heart, and that's in a three-stage reconstruction process. So long-term we don't know even for healthy kids who don't have the Down syndrome. On the Down syndrome side of things, cardiac defects are pretty common for kids with Down syndrome. Nobody is willing to give us a number. We want to be prepared, but we've sort of been told, "Well, you know, enjoy her while you have her and think more short term." Her health has been good, but we don't know how long her heart's going to last her. But her life is valuable to us, and she's part of our family and, you know, you make the sacrifices.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Our life has changed tremendously.
RUSH: And she's going to grow older and you're going to be able to communicate and have a relationship with her.
CALLER: Right. We have a relationship with her already, and she'd delayed. She's developmentally delayed and motor-wise and cognitively. Hopefully having her eyes and ears fixed is going to help some of that along, but, you know, she's a person, and she was a person in the womb, and we loved her then. We love her in the womb, out of the womb, but to make decisions based on, "Oh, how hard is this?" That's not right. It doesn't matter how hard it is. You have to do what's right because there are certain absolute truths. If it's a human being, it's a human being. You can't say, "Well, because it's disabled it's not a human being. It's a frog. We're going to throw it away." So...
RUSH: Here's the conflict on this for me. I'm not disagreeing with you. Don't misunderstand. But we have these people who say, "This disability, or the possibility of this disease or whatever the genetic testing shows, indicates that this is just not worth a good quality of life," and yet there are certain people that can't wait to use and exploit these people for all kinds of gain, political or financial or personal gain. So the same people who are telling us, trying to convince us that it is "compassionate" to not give birth to these babies are many times the same ones who will then take them and exploit them and use them to point out how other people "don't care about making them well."
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: I'll tell you, it infuriates me; it insults me, and when I hear people like you tell your story, it changes my whole perspective when I envision the country and I hear people talk about how rotten the times are. Even when we had a good economy, some people portray it as a soup line economy, how much misery there is out there. I think all of that is relative to what people's expectations are, but the stories such as yours, to me, are on a par with people who join the military. I mean, you're special people who do what you do, and there are a lot of you who do it, but nobody talks about you. Nobody knows what you're doing. You're not doing it for fame. You're not doing it for any kind of acclaim or to get noticed. You're doing it just because it's the right thing and you're accepting your responsibility, and it moves me. I think that it's people like you that make the country work, you and your husband --
CALLER: Well, thank you.
RUSH: -- and all others like you who are devoted to your principles. You understand the responsibilities that you incurred and you accepted, and more than that, you obviously, as you've expressed it, have a profound reverence for the dignity of life.
CALLER: Absolutely. I'd like to comment on one thing you said there. I've had some people say this to me before my daughter was born. "It takes a special person to have a baby with Down," and you know, I don't feel that special. What I think: extraordinary circumstances make people extraordinary. I don't think that my husband or I were some great people and therefore we could take this on. I think when you take things on because it's the right thing to do, you become a greater person.
RUSH: There's a phrase --
CALLER: On the philosophical side, I think people are missing something when they take what they think is the easy way out, because they want to avoid the thing that's hard. It's the hard thing that makes you extraordinary, not the easy thing.
RUSH: Yeah. Look it, this is purely anecdotal, and I'm sure that there are people who are going to be shouting at their radios when I say this, but I have friends who have children with autism. I know people who have kids with Down syndrome. I've never heard one say, "I wish I hadn't given birth to this child." I've never heard it. Now, I'm sure there are people out there that have, but they don't say it publicly. I've never heard them say that. They say just the contrary. They talk about what their kids have taught them.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm. That's right. How can I love better?
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: How can I sacrifice more? That's what being a mother is, and I have three other children, and I need to sacrifice for them, too, in their own ways, and they're perfectly normal and healthy and delightful, too, and what are they going to learn because of this sister who has difficulties?
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: It's going to make them better people. I just don't see a downside to it. It's a sacrifice. But, you know, anything in life that's worth doing requires sacrifice, personal sacrifice. Whether you want to be an athlete, whether you want to be great in your career, whether you just want to be the best spouse and parent you can be, it requires sacrifice.
RUSH: Well, nothing that's worth it is easy.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Being a parent of a normal child has all kinds of challenges and problems --
CALLER: Certainly.
RUSH: -- you have to deal with. This is just a different set that you have.
CALLER: Mmm-hmm.
RUSH: There's a phrase. You talked about how you and your husband don't think you're anything special. The phrase that I've always used to describe the possibilities because of the freedom we have in this country and the prosperity and who it is that's made the country great: "Ordinary people doing extraordinary things" is what has defined the greatness of the country. Greatness is assigned after the fact, and it's based on achievement and accomplishment. I don't know too many great people who had that as their ambition when they were in high school. "I want to be great." It happens to those who have something else as their objective. So it could be said, someday, of you and your husband that you were great people, but that's not what you're trying to do here.
CALLER: You want to do the right thing --
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: -- and live life the right way.
RUSH: Precisely. Well, I'm glad you held on through the break. This has been most enlightening.
CALLER: Well, thank you.
RUSH: You have a wonderful Thanksgiving and Christmas season, okay?
CALLER: You, too, Rush. Thank you so much.
RUSH: Okay, Katie. She's calling from Ann Arbor, by the way, if you're wondering. She said she lives where some experts on all this are close by. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Background Material...
(Daily Mail: I've designed my baby)
(Daily Telegraph: Babies 'designed' to be free of disease)
(Daily Mail: Outrage as Church backs calls for
severely disabled babies to be killed at birth)
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