“When I walked into the room they all turned to me and said ‘Leo has Down syndrome,” he told ABC News. “I had a few moments of shock.”
[…]
“I got the ultimatum right then,” he said. “She told me if I kept him then we would get a divorce.”
God. The brainwashing it takes to make a mother so cold boggles my mind. Apparently much of Eastern Europe just abandons children with disorders.
In this tiny, landlocked country renowned for its’ hospitality, scores of babies are abandoned each year, for reasons ranging from physical or intellectual disabilities and minor ‘imperfections’. This practice of abandoning children due to disabilities is unfortunately widespread throughout Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, resulting from a culture which refused to accept human defects. Health professionals estimate that 98% of all Down Syndrome babies born in Armenia are abandoned, every year. These abandoned babies are often placed in squalid orphanages, where they live and die, rejected and forgotten by society.
Leo’s Dad made a tough but, in my opinion, right choice to keep his son, but in doing so he lost his wife.
Humanity can be really ugly. While Armenia abandons 98% of Down Syndrome babies, the UK kills 92% of Down Syndrome babies before they are even born. The same goes in the US, where 92% of women that find out before their baby is born abort. When will we look back at what we’ve done as a people and see the premeditated genocide of babies as wrong?