It's Perfectly Legal in Many States to Deny People With Down Syndrome Organ Transplants

[Nevilledog]

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Mark Joseph Stern
@mjs_DC
This year, Arizona and South Dakota passed laws banning abortions because of Down Syndrome.

They did not, however, pass laws banning the denial of an organ transplant to people with Down Syndrome, which remains legal in both states.

It’s Perfectly Legal in Many States to Deny People With Down Syndrome Organ Transplants
How did we get here?
slate.com
8:21 AM · Jun 14, 2021

https://slate.com/technology/2021/06/organ-transplants-down-syndrome-iq.html

My daughter was born with a small hole in her heart. Such abnormalities are common in babies with Down syndrome, and we were lucky that her heart quickly repaired itself as she grew. Now as a third-grader, she rides her bike in our neighborhood on Saturday mornings, and she plays tag with her friends at recess. During those early days of her life as we faced an unexpected future, I could not have imagined what a life force my daughter would become. She takes violin lessons, enjoys reading, and is learning her multiplication facts, all thanks to teachers who have put aside any assumptions they might have had about what people with Down syndrome are capable of.

Yet, if my daughter’s heart had not healed when she was a baby, she could have been refused an organ transplant based on her intellectual disability. Currently, only 26 states have laws in place that explicitly prohibit this discrimination. Despite federal protections such as the Americans With Disabilities Act, there remains an alarming rift between what the law requires and what medical professionals practice. In a study from 2008, 85 percent of organ transplant centers surveyed considered disability when deciding if a patient should be on an organ transplant list. Forty-four percent of centers said they would deny an organ transplant to a child with some level of neurodevelopmental disability.

In February, Reps. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Washington, and Katie Porter, D-California, introduced the Charlotte Woodward Organ Transplant Discrimination Prevention Act (H.R. 1235), federal legislation that would end the common practice of denying people with intellectual disabilities lifesaving organ transplants. The Charlotte Woodward Act would affirm that having an intellectual disability is not synonymous with a low quality of life or a life less worth living. It would also serve as a much-needed guardrail against the persistent discrimination that has accompanied the IQ test since its development. The test helps my daughter’s teachers understand how she learns best and qualifies her for certain forms of social support. But it also exposes her to a lifetime of judgment and preexisting determinations.

There might be no better way to understand how “intelligence” became a requirement for organ transplants than to look at the IQ test’s history. The evaluation of intellectual functioning has been determined by an IQ test since the early 20th century. French psychologists Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon designed the first intelligence test in 1905 to identify children whose poor performance indicated a need for more help. Binet’s test consisted of a series of short tasks that related to basic expectations for comprehension and reasoning. Children were asked to label parts of the body, to describe the difference between a fly and a butterfly, and to use scissors to cut a specified shape out of a piece of paper. Binet sequenced the tasks according to their difficulty, and a child proceeded through the exam until she could no longer complete the tasks. The age associated with the last task she could perform was her assigned “mental age.” This number was divided by the child’s chronological age to arrive at her intelligence quotient, or IQ. In versions of the IQ test now supported by the American Psychology Association, IQ is a complex composite determined by a series of subtests and standard deviations. My daughter takes an IQ test every three years.

*snip*

[EYESORE 9001]

1. Unborn? Yer golden.

Born? Yer fuckt.

[Solly Mack]

2. How they always operate. They (claim to) love a fetus but they dearly hate the child.

[Ocelot II]

3. Only the pre-born are protected. Once you're born you're on your own.

Which is clear proof that the purpose of abortion restrictions is not to protect "life," but to control women's sexual behavior. Those bad, slutty women who have sex are required to have babies as punishment, and once those babies are born the women won't get a dime's worth of help from those who required them to give birth.

[ck4829]

4. K&R

Last edited Tue Jun 29, 2021, 12:38 PM - Edit history (1)

Critical Race Theory

[WhiskeyGrinder]

5. Thanks for this. I had no idea. K&R.