Word: mongoloid
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...clear that the Mongoloid child is a burden on himself. In fact, most evidence suggests that such a child, whose IQ is usually far below the norm, is happy unto himself, for he remains unaware of his handicap. Therefore, if he is a burden on anyone, he may be on his parents and siblings...
Clearly, this is not precisely analogous to the case discussed here. As pointed out, the Mongoloid is not a danger of any sort to the people around him. He is an individual with a happy disposition, responsive to loving care. Nevertheless, the case is one in which people are driven to sacrifice life in the interest of the well-being of the survivors...
Mothers of mongoloid children, that is, children like Kathryn, can't really point to anything that caused the birth of this child. Medical science has so far only discovered a correlation between the age of the mother and the child's possession of the one extra chromosome that is characteristic of Mongolism: the older the mother is, the greater the chance of having a Mongoloid baby. So when a Mongoloid child is born, even the doctors do not really know what went wrong. They only know that that one little chromosome will make a Mongolian idiot out of a normal...
...today seems to be moving toward the humanization of the institutionalizing process, technology seems to be veering in the opposite direction, toward a more dehumanizing goal. One thing that has emphatically not changed, however is professional attitudes towards retardation and especially towards Mongolism. And what this means is that Mongoloid children may be, in ever increasing numbers, the victims of a society that finds it easier to bury its problems than to deal with them...
...technological advance that affects the fate of Mongoloid children is the development of amniocentesis. This method of determining if a fetus has genetic defects by analyzing fluid drawn from the amniotic sac during pregnancy was developed during the early 1960s to detect blood type incompatability between the mother and her child...