Like Sally Phillips, who hosted A World without Down’s Syndrome? last night on BBC2, I have a child born with that extra chromosome. So you could say I had a vested interest in what she said. In effect, the programme kept returning to the question, which Sally reflected on several times: “Do you want a world without Olly?” (her own mischievous 12-year-old son) – or in my own case, “Can I conceive of a world without Cecilia?”
The answer in both cases is, “Of course not.” But it is the question that the experts, the doctors, nurses and other professionals who “counsel” pregnant women whose ante-natal test for Down’s has come back positive, never raise. For them it is simply an abstract matter of “disability – possibly severe”, “a heavy burden”, a “woman’s choice”, never a discussion of a living human being, a person with a name, who has the same longing to be loved as the rest of us.
