Which child has the disability?

I’ve worked in news/talk radio for 25 years, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve been compelled to call in, to be on the other side of the microphone, the other side of the KSL experience.

“KSL. What is your comment or question?”

“Hi. It’s Amanda. I don’t know if you want to put me on or not but . . .”

I remember calling in from Ground Zero two weeks after 9/11 when I just happened to be in New York City. I remember calling in from New Orleans on the morning of the vote when David Duke was on the ballot. I remember calling in when the topic was whether organ donors should be allowed to remain anonymous in death if they chose to. (My mother was the beneficiary of such an organ donation, and it gave me 20 years with her I would not otherwise have enjoyed.)

And one was this week.

Doug Wright was talking about a new test, a simple blood test, which would allow a pregnant woman to know at 10 weeks whether or not the baby she is carrying has Down syndrome. The test is highly accurate and would in some cases remove the need for the more dangerous amniocentesis. And it would, as Wright explained, lead many pregnant women to make the decision to end their pregnancies. Wright posed the question, “What will this test do to the Down syndrome population?”

I felt the heat rise up in my chest as I reached for the phone. I didn’t know if it was appropriate or not to call in, but I would let Wright's producer make that decision. I had to call. My oldest daughter is Laurel. She has Down syndrome.

She has prompted me to think of disability differently. Which child is disabled: the one who cannot love or the one who cannot perform calculus? Which child? The one who cannot forgive or the one who cannot communicate at high levels? What if there were a test you could perform at ten weeks that showed this child is going to grow up to manipulate people, to hurt them tremendously and feel nothing, to lie and cause extreme harm and be incapable of compassion? What about that child? Is that child disabled?

“They’re human beings,” Julie DeAzevedo Hanks, owner and clinical director of Wasatch Family Therapy, said on “A Woman’s View.” “We can’t predict their potential. They have a say in what they do with their genetic material.”