RRJ #1
...een a better time than now to be born with Down syndrome- and that’s really saying something, since it as recently been reported in chimpanzees and gorillas. I was really surprised to read that Down syndrome has also occurred in chimps and gorillas. That means, like Berube points out later on, that this syndrome has been in the development of humans for 15 million years, possibly more. And, until now, people with Downs were just put in institutions and forgotten about. They weren’t given any chance to even try and develop in the real world. They were forgotten about, and that was that. This would be such a difficult decision for any parent. Berube also talked about the fact that most parents never said the child was born if they were institutionalized. Or, they said they had a miscarriage. That would also be an extremely difficult lie to tell someone. My subconscious would be yearning to tell them the truth, but I would know I couldn’t do such a thing. Its amazing that most children with Downs weren’t even given a chance. “But although James is pretty solid proof that human biology “exists” independently of our understanding of it, every morning when he gets up, smiling and babbling to his family, I can see for myself how much of his life depends on our social practices.” That quote seems so obvious to most of us even though most people in the 1970s thought that a child with Down syndrome had no chance of living a normal life, no matter what happened with environment. Well, this passage and life story is proof that isn’t true. If the parents try hard enough with their child and note differences from one day to the next developmentally, it seems apparent that environment plays a major role in how a child will turn out with Downs. Most parents, it seems, are willing to put out the extra effort to make sure that their child will lead a normal life in a normal public school. I would definitely do the same thing. It would be so hard to just abandon a life of any kind, especially your own child. To just lock them up in an institution and rarely (if ever) see them again seems so inhumane and wrong. “Like Nick, James has a keen sense of humor; the two of them can be set agiggle by pratfalls, radical incongruities, and mere s...