Were there more people with Downs Syndrome a century ago?

Factual Questions
1

Researching DS stats for one of the Palin threads the number I came across was that the odds of of a mother over 40 having a DS baby are about 1 in 30.

Today there aren’t that many women, percentagewise at least, who have children over 40. At least some who become pregnant with children with DS probably elect to abort each year- wasn’t able to find statistics.

If you back up a century, LOTS more women had children at 35 or after than do today (if not numerically then at least percentagewise). Before birth control was available or abortion was an option and large family sizes were the norm (and large families even to be wished for by some families) it was very common to see women with grandchildren older than their youngest children- in fact most of my own great-grandmothers would have been capable of nursing their oldest grandchild. On almost every page of the census, at least in rural areas, you’ll see entries like

The gaps in the older children generally being adult kids who have married and or left home.

Women weren’t just more likely to have kids when they were 35 than women today are over but they were likely to have more kids after the age of 35 than women today are. Mothers as old as 48 or so when the youngest was born aren’t that terribly uncommon, and the youngest child rarely had a really sizeable gap (like 15 or 20 years) between them and the next sibling up.

The Census records recorded (pardon me for using the terms, but it’s what was used) “blind/idiot/insane” in various records, but they didn’t usually indicate or specify a particular diagnosis. “Idiot” could mean retarded or even such things as epilepsy or cerebral palsy in which the child/adult’s mind was actually perfectly good but their body had serious issues. (I have read the term “Mongolian idiot” in literature of the early 20th century describing a 22 year old girl who was pregnant [this was while researching eugenics] which I assume was the pre- PC term for Down’s Syndrome.)

Anyway, just curious: I’ve done some googling but not any really in-depth research. Does anybody know if there were more DS children (or children who had other congenital defects more common among children of older parents) in previous generations than now? You don’t tend to hear of them, and if the answer is yes it’d be interesting to research how they addressed the issue and if no then it’d be interesting to learn why not.

2

Maybe Camille was an unmarried woman of loose morals and Peter, Mollie, Patty, and Tommy were actually Martha’s grandchildren.

3

I don’t know the answer, but I just want to share that I have also seen a lot of the same thing in my genealogy research. In numerous census records of my ancestors, I see women bearing 10-15 (or more) children over the entire course of their childbearing years. I often see a woman’s grandchildren being older than her youngest children. Basically, without birth control (and especially in Catholic families) these women had no choice but to keep having kids until menopause or until they die in childbirth. (Thank god for modern birth control!!!)

4

I can’t say whether or not there were more births of DS individuals a century ago, but more births doesn’t necessarily mean there would be more people afflicted. In the 1980s, the average lifespan of someone with Down syndrome was 25 years. Before modern medical care, I imagine it was even shorter than that, due to the health complications associated with it.

5

Isn’t there a lot of folk wisdom about “change of life babies”? It was always my impression that that could be a weird southern euphemism for gay, but that it could also just be used as a catch all expression for “strange”. Maybe this is part of the reason. (and yes, I know that equating gay with MR is . . . unenlightened . . .all around, but so are an awful lot of southern expressions)

6

As far as I know, a “change of life baby” is one that is born when the mom thought she might be going through menopause and instead found she was pregnant.

7

That’s the way I always understood it, too. Or a pregnancy that started after the woman was sure that she was no longer fertile. As in, it had been a year or so since the last period and now there’s a pregnancy.

8

I’ve got a aunt that’s younger than me.

The only gap in years between my mothers 12 brothers and sisters are the gaps from still births and miscarriages. My Gran was poor and pregnant for 18 years straight. She was a tiny little slight lady and died in her own bed at 88. Hard life.

My Ma had two and then had the tubes tied.

9

That’s what a change of life baby, is, yes. And change of life babies are supposed to be a little strange. Since change of life baby = older mother, I am suggesting that this stereotype may be related to what Sampiro is asking about.

10

Hijacking my own thread, but something I’ve wondered many times about these families (huge families, not necessarily Catholic [down South Catholicism wasn’t that common outside of Louisiana and parts of Texas, but families still tended to huge due to the farms/no birth control]) is “what’s it like for a woman to learn she’s pregnant for the 13th time?” or “what is the death of a baby like for people who have a huge family and live in a time/place when some infant mortality is to be expected?”

It’s a different answer for each individual case of course, but I’m guessing that for women like my great-grandmother (15 kids) and her mother (14 kids) and others in the family who had families that size, it was probably just a “here we go again” sensation. Not really delighted, not really devastated, but “it’s the way of women”.

The death of a baby I’m sure was always hard, but it had to have been different in a time and place when pretty much any family with many children could expect to lose at least one. If you didn’t know have a stillbirth or a child who died in early childhood in your immediate family you’d almost certainly know somebody who did.
(My g-g-grandfather’s obituary in 1908 actually made mention of how rare it was that he fathered 14 children and all were still alive; in the cemetery where my father is buried is a turn of the century couple whose graves are surrounded by nine graves of their infants [they did have at least two children who survived to adulthood {it’s odd how you’ll actually come to care about people who were dead for a generation before you were born… but I digress}]).

My guess would be that there was grieving, lots of “at least you still have Ada and Bertha and Caleb and Danny and Edna and Fiona and Gershom and Hilda” type comforting, but that probably- in the absence of effective anti-depressants- two things would have brought them out of depression sooner than most women today. The first would have been comradeship: since a lot more women lost babies and young children there’d have been an automatic support group within the neighborhood or community if not within the family itself (your mother and grandmother talking about their lost children and knowing the basics of what you’re going through)*, and the second just the sheer absolute business of life in a time when a meal could take all day to cook, laundry was washed in boiling water, and you’re still expected to work the fields at harvest/to do piecework or whatever would probably almost force people out of depression (not to say that it wouldn’t still have been sad obviously).

*Camaraderie and business are also the only reason I can think of that 2 million returning veterans of the Civil War on both sides who’d been through years of absolute hell didn’t suddenly start shooting their neighbors or their families or just wind up blithering idiots in a corner. If you were a veteran then chances are most of your male neighbors and brothers and cousins and friends were as well (especially in the south where most of the men of fighting age served, whether volunteers or draftees) thus you had community, and again- if you come home to a hungry wife and 4 hungry children and a failing farm, you don’t have much liberty or free time for self pity. (This is not to say that depression [from which I myself suffer] is synonymous with self-absorbed self-pity, but I do know from experience that leisure lends itself to indulgence of depression and the “no option but to be busy” dissipates it to an extent [i.e. if you’re depressed and have no choice but to work or be homeless, you probably will work, while if you have the option, you probably won’t.)
Sorry for the hijacks all around. It’s an area I find interesting.

11

On a only tangentially related note, my great-grandmother, a second generation Irish Catholic, had eight children. According to my grandmother (her oldest), she was “hospitalized” for at least a month or two after every birth.

12

In Cameroon it is not uncommon to give birth to around ten kids. One of my best friends had 9 living children, ages 24, 22, 17, 14, 12, 10, 8, 6 and 4.

In Cameroon, women spent most of their lives from their mid-teens either pregnant or breastfeeding. So in a way, it’s just the rhythm of life- your born, you have kids, you spend some time being old, then you die. The “having kids” part was a lot like the “you have a career” part is for us. It’s just what you do as an adult. I don’t think “getting pregnant” was that momentous of an event- you kind of expected to be pregnant at any given time.

Not to say people weren’t excited by babies. Each kid added something new to the household, and I think people really looked forward to having a little one around to keep things lively (keep in mind older kids did a lot of the actual childcare). And of course as they got older eventually women would start getting tired and complain that they were getting a bit old to be having kids every couple of years.

It depends on the age and kind of death. To lose a toddler to malaria would be a little expected, and I think people kept some emotional distance until children survived their first serious bout with malaria. Babies especially were considered creatures that may well not be there tomorrow. But to lose an older child, especially to something like an accident, would still be as emotionally difficult as it is for American mothers.

That given, people expected to lose a few children. People would constantly freak out when I said I only wanted one kid, and tell me I ought to have at least a couple of back ups in case they start dying on me.

I saw a lot of depression. It wasn’t just dead children that could get people down. Women were very isolated and had so little control over even the smallest parts of their lives. Who they married, where they lived- even their clothes were picked up out by their husbands. And they couldn’t even pin their hopes on their kids having a better life. By age thirty you’d probably have already married off a daughter to live the exact same life you were living. The chores kept people busy, but it also kept people isolated. As for camaraderie- the older women in the household were usually spread out in the fields or the markets or whatever, so chances are it’d just be you and whatever kids were too young to walk off hanging out in the house all day working. And even if you were with people, village society can be insular and backbiting.

I lived in a compound with a young woman and I don’t know how she did it- alone with a 2 year old and a 4 year old all day, doing the daily grind of endless chores from 4 AM to 11PM, with at best a visit from a gossipy old woman or a busybody aunt to break the monotony. Even holidays just meant she had more to cook. I rarely saw her smile.

13

Yup.

I was at first presumed to be a lingering case of the flu.

14

I can’t speak for every place and every time, obviously, but I can offer a couple of anecdotes about women who faced losing infants in the fifties.

My grandmother’s second child, Christine, was born alive but died within hours of her birth. The child was taken from her at birth and she was never permitted to see it. Someone came in and told her that the baby wouldn’t survive, and later she was informed that it had died.

In those days, women spent two weeks in hospital flat on their backs after a birth, no exceptions, and so she wasn’t permitted out of hospital to attend the child’s funeral. A death certificate was issued but I discovered a couple of years ago that no one bothered to submit the birth registration (despite my grandmother insisting that she remembers filling it in). The officials also didn’t bother putting Christine’s name on the death certificate (she’s recorded as Baby Wilton), and the cemetery either didn’t record the site of her burial (unmarked grave, my grandparents were as poor as churchmice) or recorded it under the wrong name (the records show a baby named “Lee” was buried in the cemetery that same month, but I can’t find a death record for a baby named Lee in this state in that year. Nor does the name Lee have any connection to our family).

The doctor’s advice to my grandmother was to forget it and have another. There was no counselling or even sympathy in those days. Forget it, don’t talk about it, have another, move on was the general wisdom.

The other lady was a neighbour of my mother. When her daughter was born, again in the fifties, the baby’s birth weight was low and she wasn’t expected to survive. The doctor came in and broke the news to the new mother thusly “Now don’t start blubbing but your baby’s not going to live”. The child was taken away to a children’s hospital soon after her arrival, and the mother wasn’t allowed to see her until she was about two weeks old.

Sweeping things under the rug is a tried and true method of dealing with them. The death of an infant in an age where another could be expected in a year or so was not given the same significance as it is today.

15

HA! You must come from money. My grandmother had eight that lived and she was probably lucky to find a shady place in the cotton field to squat them out. Same pattern - the youngest kids grew up with the oldest grandkids. Which means that the child of the middle boy (me) has nobody near her age on that side of the family, oddly enough. My dad was thought to be infertile until his second marriage, which was to my mother, so I was accidentally the youngest of 20 grandkids.

ETA - it’s an interesting question, and not something you really think about. Whoever upthread pointed out that there wouldn’t necessarily have been more Down’s people AROUND even if there were more born does have a point, though.

16

I don’t know the details of how she found out, but one of my great-grandmothers had her last child at 47. At that age, he had to be unexpected. He was her sixth baby, and the youngest of the family by some years.

17

HA! My family used to dream of the year when there’d be a good harvest and finally, if they were lucky, they’d have a shady place in the cotton field to give birth. It wasn’t uncommon at all for my great-grandmother to give birth during the morning while serving breakfast and then again in the evening while pouring tar on the roof. Worst part- they had a tin roofed house, but her husband insisted on her pouring tar on it whenever she was having her second baby of the day (old superstition about how a woman in labor pouring tar will insure a good peach crop).:wink:

Actually, my grandfather, one of 15 kids (and as the 3rd oldest he could remember his mother constantly being pregnant for most of the first 24 years of his life) read a children’s book to me about insects when I was a kid in which it mentioned how queen termites will give birth at one end while slaves feed them at the other. He said “Me and my brothers and sisters had something like that worked out with my mama, Queen Kate”. (Queen Kate was her nickname, even to some of her kids and grandkids; she was fat and very buxom in the pictures I’ve seen of her as an old woman, but tiny in height- about 4’11 or so- and supposedly looked like a “beachball with legs” when pregnant; her father married her stepmother when she was about 10 and her own first child was born when she was 15 or 16 [dob varies] but there was about a 15 year stretch when either she or her stepmother was always pregnant; by the accounts of her children the reason she had 15 children was because her stepmother [who she didn’t like until they outlived the rest of the family and became friends] had 14.)

Thanks for your answers even sven: the “constant childbirth as a career” is an angle that I hadn’t considered but it’s probably the closest. It’s just what you did, much like now mothers accept working in a business then coming home and fixing dinner and helping the kids with their projects is how millions of women now view “a day in the life”. The “don’t get attached” rule is probably true as well.

My mother had a good friend, Mary Cass, who was much older- old enough to be her mother in fact- whose oldest child was born during the Depression and reminded me a good bit of Cazzle’s story. Like Aunt Christine in that, Mary Cass never saw the baby or attended the funeral, and she was told by those present that the baby was deformed and that it was a mercy the child died. Only many years later did one of the relatives who was there betray the “secret” that the child was perfectly formed, it just happened to be stillborn.
This news actually made Mary Cass happy, even though it came by the time her baby would have been an adult. The freaky thing is that she had been told her oldest baby was deformed in order to make her feel better! (Basically “oh don’t worry, that old car you wrecked wasn’t worth nothin’ no-how”.)

One of the most pitiful stories in Angela’s Ashes was when McCourt’s father, who was devastated over the death of his baby daughter, nevertheless sold the baby’s dead body to a medical school to be used as a cadaver. (Of course both he and Angela were parents you wanted to kick until your foot went numb anyway.)

18

No, people really did live like that. My MIL is the second daughter, born when her mother was about 20 years old. MIL also had her first baby at 20 or so, and her mother went on having siblings, so two of my sister in law’s aunts are younger than she is.

19

I always suspected there was a deleted scene in The Music Man that revealed Winthrop belonged to Marion the Librarian, and that this may explain not only the huge age difference but just why Old Miser Madison “left all the books to her”.

20

I was about to say “I wish!!!” when I realized that I actually have no idea.

After said great-grandmother died, and presumably while she was committed (as Nan has casually mentioned it happening on several occasions), my great-grandfather dumped all of the children into the care of the local Catholic nuns. As he basically abandoned them, they didn’t see much of him. So I’ve never been told what his job was, or whether or not they had any money at first.

(Living with the nuns wasn’t much fun, apparently. The older girls were eventually farmed out to work as maids and such; one of my great-aunts ended up being raped by the father of the family she was living with, which triggered the mental illness and alcoholism that ruled the rest of her life. And one of my great-uncles ran away at 14 or 15 to join the circus as a geek.)