I don’t have cite, but I thought euthanasia by midwifes of obviously very impaired/deformed infants (including those with DS) was fairly common in years gone by (I seem to remember some euphamism was used, and the child was recorded as a still birth).
Personally, I gotta figure booze, too. That, and you don’t have to hold Post-Traumatic Stress in till it kills you…just until something does.
Say! He wasn’t old enough to join Barnum, was he? In the off chance he was, maybe he met MY great[sup]+[/sup] aunt. She was the Fat Lady!
I’m not sure - now I wish that I had asked! My primary memories of him are of him doing stuff like sticking needles through his fingers to entertain us kids at Christmas. It would have been… around 1938 or '39? Would that have matched up?
I’ve been transcribing nineteenth century gravesone inscriptions from a British cemetery (from paper records onto a computer database). It’s a skewed sample of course but provides quite a bit of evidence that people cared deeply about the death of their infants. There are the epitaphs and comments but also the way the exact ages are recorded – six months and three days, three years and seven months – which imply that every day of the child’s life was precious. It’s also evident that sometimes they couldn’t afford a gravestone until long after the childrens’ deaths some stones have long lists of such infants with all the details of the dates of their lives and deaths, showing that their memories were carefully preserved.
On the other hand there are some brutal newspaper stories of infanticides in our records (we have a collection of newspaper articles and obituaries). Bodies of murdered babies were found abandoned with clear marks of violence.
I’ve actually seen a good many (old) adult graves that did that as well (“Departed this life at 79 years, 2 months, 3 days”). I’ve also seen a lot of graves that just read “INFANT” (no name or gender, maybe a date, and you assume it’s the child of somebody close around).
We have socialised medicine here so a lot of things are probably done differently, but AFAIK amniocentesis is usually only performed when there is a specific risk or at the request of the mother/parents. It does carry a risk of miscarriage with it, so it’s not something that’s encouraged if there isn’t a good reason to do it.
At the 12 week ultrasound, the thickness of the skin on the back of the fetus’s neck is measured. A thicker than normal reading is a potential indicator of Down Syndrome. The parents can opt for further testing if they wish. There’s also a blood test they do around the same time that can determine if the fetus is potentially affected by a variety of other genetic diseases, though I can’t recall what they are off the top of my head.
I only know two people who’ve said they had an amniocentesis done, and a possible third: one of the girls from work during her first pregnancy, but she wasn’t clear on why; a girl I went to school with, because she lost her previous child to one of the Trisomy defects (I can never remember if it was 13 or 18 - either way, it was horrible). The potential third was told after her 12 week ultrasound that the baby may have Down Syndrome (Trisomy 21) based on the skin measurements I mentioned earlier, but this turned out not to be the case.
Those stories match similar ones from my family and frieds. I will note that that seems to have been very much a “fifties” phenomenon (although the beginnings of such attitudes might have started in larger cities in the 1920s and slowly contaminated the medical industry until the revolts of the mid-1970s).
Without going into the various pop-psychology reasons I have heard offered as explanation, I will note that such attitudes seem to have grown as medicine moved out of the home and into hospitals. It did not really turn around until Elisabeth Kübler-Ross began to challenge that approach. (However much of a kook she later became, her earliest work did have the benefit of challenging the way we faced and treated death in the U.S.)
Hmmm…no, probably not, I’m afraid. Rosina Delight died sixty years previously.