The New York Times has an encouraging article on Dr. Alberto Costa. He is a man on a mission to discover a drug to treat the cognitive issues associated with Down Syndrome. He has proven results in mice and now he is moving to patients:
Now Costa has taken the next step: he is completing the first randomized clinical trial ever to take a drug that worked in mice with Down and apply it to humans with the disease, a milestone in the history of Down-syndrome research.
“This was a disorder for which it was believed there was no hope, no treatment, and people thought, Why waste your time?” says Craig C. Garner, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and co-director of the Center for Research and Treatment of Down Syndrome at Stanford University. “The last 10 years have seen a revolution in neuroscience, so that we now realize that the brain is amazingly plastic, very flexible, and systems can be repaired.”
This is real medicine. Unlike the process the Times suggests may cut this revolution in Downs treatment short: early prenatal diagnosis coupled with abortion or what I call eugenic abortion. Eugenic abortion does not fix or treat any disease and yet it is often described (even this article) as a way to "prevent" disease. Eugenic abortion does not prevent the occurrence of an extra chromosome 21, it just makes sure anyone with an extra chromosome 21 does not make it out of the womb. That is not medicine, that is "geneocide", the eradication of a population because of their genetics.
If the eugenic abortion way of "treating" disease was applied to cancer, all of the cancer patients would be identified early and then killed and the medical community would claim that they "eliminated cancer." Eugenic abortion does not treat or cure disease, it literally throws the baby out with the dirty genetic bath water. Dr. Costa's approach of treating people with Down Syndrome instead of getting rid of them is true medicine. With Dr. Costa there is hope. Eugenic abortion is inherently hopeless.
Another problem with eugenic abortion is that it reduces research funding and support for those with Down Syndrome that do make it out of the womb. The New York Times article points out that Down Syndrome research gets much less funding that other genetic disorders, and suggests this is because the medical establishment assumes that it is "treated" by eugenic abortion:
But Costa points to a falloff in the financing of Down-syndrome research since the prenatal tests have been in development. Although it’s difficult to compare the numbers, money from the National Institutes of Health dropped to $16 million in 2007 from $23 million in 2003, before creeping back up to $22 million in 2011. That’s far less than the $68 million slated for cystic fibrosis, which affects an estimated 30,000 people in the United States, at most one-tenth of the 300,000 to 400,000 people who have Down.
“The geneticists expect Down syndrome to disappear,” Costa says, “so why fund treatments?”
Alan Guttmacher, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, denies that this is the calculus used by his organization. Yet he offered no clear answer when I asked him why about $3,000 in research dollars is spent by N.I.H. for every person with cystic fibrosis, compared with less than $100 for every person with Down.
“The number affected is a fair metric to use,” Guttmacher said. But, he pointed out, most of N.I.H.’s funding decisions are based on the strength of proposals coming from researchers. Advocacy groups for disorders like AIDS, autism and breast cancer have certainly played a role in their gaining increased funding, he said. And perhaps, he speculated, Down suffers from an image problem.
The "image problem" is that 90% of fetuses with Downs are aborted which means many people have never met someone with Down Syndrome and so do not know what wonderful people they truly are. This feeds the stereotype that so many have that a child is better dead than having to life a life with Downs. Representative Cathy McMorris-Rodgers echos the sentiment that maybe eugenic abortion is the reason funding for Downs is hard to come by:
Representative Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, Republican of Washington, who co-founded the Congressional Down Syndrome Caucus soon after her 4-year-old son, Cole, was born with the disorder, has had little success in having money appropriated for Down research.
“I find myself wondering how N.I.H. really sets their priorities,” she told me. “I’m quite concerned that so many of the researchers in the Down-syndrome field have difficulty getting funded.” She continued, “My fear is that for some, they believe that it’s been taken care of through prenatal diagnosis.”
I applaud Dr. Costa for taking the right approach. I truly hope his trial is a magnificent success. I encourage other medical professionals to see that what he is doing is real medicine geared toward treating disease. Eugenic abortion is the polar opposite. Dr. Costa treats the patient, eugenic abortion just gets rid of the patient and calls it good.
