A wonderful film about Down’s that’ll make you laugh and cry
Sally Phillips is angry. The actress from Bridget Jones and Miranda reckons that, on a one-to-ten scale, she’s at level nine and rising. and it makes for brilliant television.
Presenters love to tell us their latest show ‘explores a passion’ or ‘fulfils a childhood dream’. Usually, that’s just ego-fluffery, to make themselves look less shallow. The truth is half of them would make a documentary about the history of the Biro and call it a ‘cathartic journey’ if it meant getting their faces on telly.
A World Without Down’s Syndrome? (BBC2) was very different. This was Sally’s first documentary, and it tackled a subject that meant more to her than life itself — her son, 11-year-old Olly.
It was profoundly moving, joyous, informative and frequently funny. The closing sequence, where dozens of children with Down’s staged an impromptu disco at a shopping centre, made me grin and sniffle at the same time.
But the underlying facts were grimly upsetting. The chromosomal condition Down’s syndrome is vanishing from Britain, because 90per cent of expectant mothers who are told that their unborn baby has the condition now choose to terminate the pregnancy. Elsewhere in Europe, that percentage is even higher — in Iceland, for the past five years, it has been 100 per cent.
Sally was furious at doctors, clinics and scientists analysing DNa, who made no attempt to tell mums-tobe that a child with Down’s can be a joy, just like any other child.
actually, they can be an even greater joy. This might sound politically incorrect, and I don’t give a stuff — for parents of children with developmental delays, there’s a delightful pleasure in having a kid who stays your baby for so much longer.
My profoundly autistic 20-year-old son is taller than me, but he’s got the slapstick sense of humour of a six-year-old. and he looks about 13: autism makes his face shine with innocence, because he doesn’t understand how cruel life can be. He’s as trusting as a puppy.
Sally compared Olly with an animal, too — a curious, friendly, gentle dodo. and the medics developing prenatal tests to screen for Down’s syndrome were like explorers who landed on the dodos’ island and bludgeoned them into extinction. The people who made the strongest case against automatic abortions in cases of Down’s were the ones with an extra chromosome themselves. There was Coronation Street actor liam Bairstow, who announced he had two ambitions — win an award and get a girlfriend.
That makes him just like every other actor, except he’s more willing to admit it. Such open honesty is one of the most appealing characteristics of Down’s.
and there was Sally’s beautiful son Olly, who loved making up nonsensical knock-knock jokes and whose laugh could make a cat giggle.
But even laughter is no match for fear, which is what one american genetics company was peddling. They offered DNa tests under the slogan, ‘It could happen to yOU!’
‘Science has no morality, you can do what you like with science,’ said one geneticist. That’s the same justification used by arms dealers.
Sally’s brave documentary has been attacked as ‘not at all helpful’ by campaigners who want to see all unborn babies tested for Down’s. Not all women had her stamina or resources, they said — criticising her, in effect, for being too loving and too middle class.
To many left-wingers, anyone who suggests abortion isn’t always the best choice is a fundamentalist nutjob. That impression was emphasised by reporter Cathy Newman in Undercover: Britain’s Abortion Extremists (C4), as she uncovered a barking U.S. preacher in london who claimed terminations were child sacrifices and the NHS was full of Satanists.
She confronted the handful of zealots and misguided hippies protesting outside clinics. But they’re an irrelevant minority.
Thank heavens for Sally Phillips and her brave statement that disabled babies have a right to life, children like her son and mine.