By a woman raising a special needs child:
My daughter needed 10 times the support of a typical kid. It also felt like the truest, most human work I could do: to love someone into whomever they would become.
I was learning. Meanwhile, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins tweeted that it was immoral for a pregnant woman to knowingly carry to term a child with Down syndrome because, according to him, disabilities decrease happiness and increase suffering. I was appalled.
When Fiona reached kindergarten in 2016, I fretted: Would her teachers think the same? That her life wasn’t “worth it”? At a standard public school, among kids twice her size, would she be dismissed as incapable, rejected as less-than?
I couldn’t know that in one year, her gross motor confidence would climb. She’d saunter down the hall with the height of a 3-year-old and the confidence of a cool kid.
Heather Lanier, “The Real Work of Parenting a Rare Girl” at Wall Street Journal
Paywalled, unfortunately.
Also: Sarah Palin pleads with her son Trig to be tolerant of Richard Dawkins: “ But, in my request for you to be tolerant, I’d have to warn Trig he must be tolerant, too, because he may superficially look at you as kind of awkward. I’ll make sure he’s polite, though!”