It promotes initiatives to give new or expectant parents up-to-date information about the conditions, as well as referrals to support services. It also authorizes the government to help create a national registry to connect birth parents with people who want to adopt a child with Down syndrome.In 2005, Brian Skotko, a resident physician at Children's Hospital Boston, surveyed more than 1,000 mothers of children with Down syndrome. He found that information mothers got from doctors was often "incomplete, inaccurate or offensive," he said. "Rarely was the option of adoption mentioned" to those diagnosed prenatally, he said.
This couple seems so lovely. After having a Down Syndrome child of their own, they adopted three more.
The Curtises, Barbara, 60, and Tripp, 54, attribute their desire for such a large family, in part, to their own unhappy childhoods. Barbara grew up without a father, and Tripp's father left when he was 12. Both came of age in the 1970s counterculture in Northern California.
Barbara had two daughters, Samantha Sunshine and Jasmine Moonbeam, before she met Tripp in 1982 at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
Two months after their first date, she learned she was pregnant. They decided to get married and have the baby. The couple bought a house in Marin County, started a tree repair business and, as Barbara described it, "surrendered" to their family, focusing on good parenting as a way to heal past missteps or misfortunes.
"We made a vow to this universal God that we would accept all the children that he-she-it would provide for us," Barbara said.
Over time, their spiritual and political views evolved into a conservative Christianity. Their business grew. So did their family. In 1992, Jonny was born. In the delivery room, the mother recalled, the doctor put a hand on her shoulder, and she understood something was different about her son. "He has Down syndrome, right?" she asked.
"It's okay," she remembers saying and believing. She said she was filled with expectation and excitement about the changes he would bring to their family.
Tripp's voice still cracks when he recalls a line of poetry the couple chose for Jonny's birth announcement before knowing about the disability: "God's gifts put man's best dreams to shame."
Would such a story ever have run during campaign season, when it's necessary to paint all Christians as freaks and haters?
