Ignorance in Academia

I'm sure glad we're not paying overpriced tuition at UNC-Chapel Hill to finance the salary of a biology professor like Albert Harris. He's the guy who recently told his biology class that babies with Down syndrome should be aborted.

Some of his students had no problem with him sharing that opinion, but others did, including a young woman who has a brother with Down syndrome. Hearing her professor say that made her physically ill, she says.

I completely empathize with her. People who don't have a loved one with special needs are often completely clueless as to what it's like for us to hear other people says cruel things about them.

Several years back, dd24 was working at a cash register when she overheard a customer say about a customer ahead of him who had Down syndrome, "They shouldn't let people like that out in public." My daughter got so mad she had to leave the area (otherwise, I probably would have had to bail her out on an assault charge).

You see, we know what most of society does not: people with Down syndrome are people we love, and they deserve life. Even though their presence in our homes and families often makes life more difficult in some ways, it makes life better in other ways. I can honestly say that our lives are better for having dsds14 in them, and we consider him a gift of God, just like his siblings.

As for Professor Harris, I think he's full of it:

Harris says he wouldn't follow his own moral position.
If he thought his wife was going to have a child with Down syndrome, he would still want to have the baby.
And he faced that situation.
His wife, then 34, was pregnant with their third child when she suffered major bleeding. Doctors told the couple to prepare for the worst.
"If our child had been born with Down syndrome as we expected, we would have cherished her," Harris said.

Beans. There are a lot of situations that can cause the mother to bleed, but Down syndrome isn't one of them, as far as I know. The baby has an extra chromosome, not the power to cause hemorrhaging. The mother must have had some other problem.

And as for "prepare for the worst," some of us see the worst as the death of a baby, not the birth of one with Down syndrome. Geez.

BTW, if you'd like a great, honest read about how God can bless a family by sending a child with disabilities, try The Dance Goes On by Roberta Bandy. We know the Bandy family, and their story is inspiring.