Am I overreacting by finding this comment upsetting?

[emkana]

Was talking to two mums, one I've know for a while and am friendly with, one I haven't known that long yet. Was talking about the awful pregnancy I had with ds, the uncertainty we had about his health, and how lucky and happy we are now that everything has turned out so well after all that worrying.

Says the first mum "I admired you really that you didn't choose to have a termination"

Now I know she is not saying I should have had a termination, but aibu to find this comment upsetting when I'm sat there talking while looking at my gorgeous ds running around?

And I'm not saying people shouldn't be having terminations. It's the things people say that show that they see ds1 as being a little bit less valuable than NT kids.

Those attitudes are reflected in lots of things that people say though, not just about termination. I remember a program about a family with 3 children (2 ASD, 1NT) moving to Scotland and there were lots of comments about the NT girl that reflected a greater value placed on her life. Or the person who told me that it wasn't fair that ds1 got so much spent on his education when he wasn't going to do anything anyway (how on earth can that be an acceptable thing to say, how am I meant to reply?). Get lots of comments like that that people think are OK to say because ds1 has learning difficulties and is therefore not worth quite the same as non LD kids.

I just find these sorts of comments all one and the same really and utterly depressing.

to you too.

is it about saying they are less valuable?

or is it about saying that some people just won't be able to do it

I know of people who have adopted disabled children whose parents just couldn't handle it

maybe if they had known beforehand they would have terminated - not because disabled people are inherently worthless, but because they didn't feel up to the job

I still don't see why admitting that you aren't as strong as you would maybe like to be is the same as saying that disabled people are less valuable

Not sure. If my husband or son were to become more disabled than they are, perhaps I wouldn't be able to cope. But I'd never dream of killing them. I'd look for help or support, or if I coudn't cope, I'd look for some sort of residential placement.

I think it takes me back to the point about how society fails to give people the support they need to make a different choice, to be able to cope or deal with the situation in some more positive way?

I think for some disabilities where quality of life is going to be guaranteed terrible, I can understand termination. I'm not 100% against it. But I can only speak for me and my own family to say that we're happy to be alive.

children are hard work full stop. disabled or not.
what do these people who think they couldn't cope when their child has an accident.
happened to my freind. healthy mobile toddler. had and accident and now has severe brain damage. did she shrug and say I can't cope? of course not.
as for people who say they admire people cos they didn't get rid.
well dd was fine till the birth. what should I have done? smothered her? of course not.

For me it's not about people being able to cope or not. Individual abilities are neither here nor there. It's about the society attitude that leads people to think its perfectly OK to talk about termination for LD's in front of a child with LD's. No-one would ever talk about a child like ds2 in front of him, yet they'll do it to ds1. It's a reflection or where people view the learning disabled.

I'm on the receiving end of lots of comments that demonstrate that ds1 is not thought as worthy as people without LD's. My friend (with a learning disabled child) is too.

I'm reading A Real Boy at the moment about a severely autistic child. I wish I could find the paragraph but the author says that people with no experience of LD's are allowed to make crass comments but equally parents are allowed to get pissed off when they do.

He also talks about imagining people's comments if his son had died after choking on a coin (he came close). He said "I thought of how people would try to reassure us that in some ways David's death was 'for the best'. How many times would I be able to stand that before I screamed at someone or lashed out?'.....They were the ones who saw his disability as half a life....... I could go on ignoring people who thought David would be better off dead because he wasn't...... The sad-sigh-and-shake-of the-head-brigade could carry on giving David doe-eyed stares and rueful smiles; if they thought he was worth less than other toddlers, they were wrong"

Fio, i agree about it be insensitive to ask at all. Which is I know not really the point of the OP.
I work with someone who asked me "If you could turn back the clock would you have terminated DD3" - ???????
Now then. The answer to that is no. But - if the answer had been yes, and I'd had such dark thoughts, does she really think I'd be happy to discuss it at coffee break? The crassness of some people astounds me.

I used to take my ds to a peadiatric hydrotherapy session at my then local hospital. I was talking to another mum there whose son had been severely brain damaged by mistakes made during his birth. She said to me that if she'd known what his quality of life and life expectancy were going to be she would have told them to stop when they were working to resussitate him after delivery. But it was her who raised this issue not me and to be honest I could sympathise with her situation. I have asked myself what my choice would have been had I known my ds was going to be born with disabilities before he was born. I didn't cope at all well in the first year and came close to being sectioned under the mental health act. At that stage, in that state of mind, I would probably have said I wish I had known so I could have terminated. But now my ds is 19 and, despite his problems, doing well I couldn't possibly imagine life without him.
I feel that a person who has to live with disabilities either themselves or in a family member is in a position to have an opinion on this but it is incredibly inappropriate for another to express a view in the way of op's friend. No one can possibly know what it is like to live with disability unless they have been there and should remember this when passing judgements on the decisions the parent of a child with a disability should make or should have made.
My mum was a sn teacher working with children with severe disabilities. In the unit where she worked there were children whose diabilities were so severe and their quality of life so apparantly poor some may think it reasonable if their mums had had a termination..........but that is nobody's opinion to express, or decision to make but the parents.