Word: mongoloids
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...Baltimore three years ago, the parents of a newborn Mongoloid baby refused to allow an operation to correct a fatal defect in the infant's digestive tract. Despite pressure from doctors and hospital personnel, they refused to change their minds, and the child slowly starved to death...
Sally Weingart is a resident at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island. She is mentally retarded, or more precisely, a mongoloid. She is twenty-one years old, but her physical appearance and the circumstances in which she lives make her age immaterial. She is three and a half feet tall and weighs fifty-four pounds. For this and other reasons I think of her as a child, but her lack of teeth makes her look like an aged woman...
...result of the famous case several years ago where a mongoloid child with an intestinal obstruction was allowed to dehydrate and die instead of being operated on, Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore, Md., established a review board to advise its medical staff. The board, which meets regularly to attempt to develop ethical guidelines, consists of a surgeon, a psychiatrist, a clergyman and a lawyer...
Since then, doctors have found that with amniocentesis Mongolism can be detected in a fetus as early as the third month. With this knowledge, a doctor would be free (and legally justified) to advise the mother to abort. Since the incidence of Mongoloid children is higher in older women, some suggest that amniocentesis be routinely performed on pregnant women over 40. Others would like to see amniocentesis become a routine part of prenatal care for all women...
...vocabulary used by doctors to describe Mongoloids is frightening. Just the word Mongoloid itself conjurs up a race--labelling this child as someone not just handicapped, but practically outside of our own familiar species. In the best pregnancy counselling offered, the parents are told that the child will need "love and affection," but will never be "like other children." At worst, we learn that this child will be a burden on society. It is obvious that there is a fear of this handicap--a fear over and above that of other handicaps. A child born blind or paraplegic will obviously...