I keep getting gimme-money letters from Smile Train. Are there really that many kids out there with cleft palates who need surgery? Is it an epidemic or something?
According to the Wikipedia cleft lips or palates occur in somewhere between one in 600-800 births.
Here’s the breakdown among different cultures
So I all you have to do is find how many babies are born each day and you’ll see.
So you would get about 365600 and 365800 or 219,000 or 292,000 a year.
One of the reasons I think it gets so much attention is that it looks bad, but in reality it is one of the easiest things to correct.
For the amount of money to fix the disfigurment, well it’s a very do-able project that produces happy results which equals good publicity for a change
I’m all in favor of it, for the reasons Markxxx gave.
I can’t speak to how common it is (and Markxxx did that anyway), but my niece was adopted from Bulgaria, and she was born with a very severe cleft palate. It is incredibly hard for a child with a cleft palate to eat; she was fed with a special bottle with a very long nipple that went into her throat, which gave her food anxieties for years. She couldn’t talk at all. The orphanage did a very bad job fixing it, just kind of a patch job, which made it harder for the doctors in the US to fix it after she was adopted. They won’t be able to fix her lip completely till after puberty. Her cleft palate combined with her probable ethnicity (Roma) made her virtually unadoptable, even though she is super affectionate and social. And cleft palate is rarely the only thing wrong with such a child, it’s usually a part of a constellation of issues. My niece, for instance, had a lot of problems with her ears (not to mention her anxiety, hypothyroidism, etc., etc.).
My sister told me a kind of funny “fact” her adoption counselor told her about kids with cleft palates. They tend to be very, very spoiled. Because it’s so hard to keep them alive when they’re first born, and they’re not that great to look at, someone (be it the parents or the orphanage workers) has to really, really want the kid to live. And this is definitely true of my niece, plus the fact that she was the first grandchild on both sides of her family, and she has the biggest brown eyes that are so hard to say “no” to.
My charitable donations tend to go to the SPCA and the Humane Association. But I sent Smile Train a donation and will do so again. The pictures of those poor little babies just haunted me.
liberty… sorry to go OT but .what types of problems with her ears? Has she been tested for any syndromes?