Surprising - in a good way - to see this article on HN. As the father of a young child with Down syndrome, I've felt everything the author expressed. Getting a

Surprising - in a good way - to see this article on HN. As the father of a young child with Down syndrome, I've felt everything the author expressed. Getting a prenatal diagnosis was one of the hardest things my wife and I have ever been through. (We did the testing so that we wouldn't bring a child with an unsurvivable genetic condition to term. For us, that would have been needlessly prolonging suffering for multiple individuals.) We were fortunate to do our mourning and grieving over the life we imagined for our unborn baby while he was still unborn. And that's what it really is - mourning the ideas and fantasies we put on our children from before they're born. Actually seeing and holding a baby really changes things. Don't confuse the inherent (and very real) challenges and risks of Ds with 1) the additional social burden we place on people with that diagnosis and 2) second order effects because we really didn't understand Ds all that well until recently. The author covered social stuff, so I'll mention a second order effect. My go-to example is that some of the speech problems previously thought "characteristic" of Ds turned out to be years of untreated ear infections in ear canals that are characteristically narrow. Once doctors learned to watch Ds kids' ears more closely, the prevalence of those speech problems decreased. People with this condition can do so much more than we thought 50, 30, or even 10 years ago. Things you think you knew from seeing "those kids" in the separate classroom on the other side of the school aren't true anymore (if they ever really were). My son's life is worth the same as any other child's, and he will be a valuable member of society when he's older. I hope you'll give him a fair chance.