Downs Test seems to browbeat women

NIPPED in the bud! With their usual lack of real consultation, some dictator in the Welsh Assembly Government has approved yet another test for Down’s Syndrome – slavishly copying benighted England once again.

A test, not a treatment: it cannot prevent anything, it cannot reduce the fixed proportion of Down’s children to be conceived in any community of real, diverse human beings. With at last the admission that amniocentesis can cause a miscarriage, Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing sounds very grand and humane, but when you look closely it is browbeating a pregnant woman into having her child destroyed before birth.

On top of the other concerns of a pregnancy, the woman is presented with an excruciating dilemma: the medical experts declare that a Down’s baby is this and that, while a woman knows perfectly well that what she is carrying is a baby – her baby.

Perhaps we in the real world can offer something better. Perhaps those who decree the death of his fellow Down’s people before birth could arrange a meeting with my grandson Jac. And tell him plainly to his face why they think it would have been better if he had not been born.

Ask also of the pale-faced ladies in wheelchairs, who, it seemed, even with the help of their carers, had not been able to enjoy the outside air for many months, if they would approve of having killed the little boy who put on a Dorothy Dinosaur hat. And did a little dance, to the amusement of them all. Finishing with a spontaneous kiss all round.

Perhaps one of our AMs could ask them if my grandson would have been better off as yet another abortion statistic.

Perhaps any of the overpaid Dr Who villains who infest the Bay could contact me by e-mail – Joseph. Biddulph@gmail.com – and tell me how they react to this. Joseph Biddulph Pontypridd