I've always been super grateful that both my kids were born healthy because the last thing a parent wants is to see their children suffering. It is precisely t__o avoid their intellectually disabled daughters from suffering__ that some parents are turning to sterilization. Sounds pretty cruel, right? But I guess you have to be in those parents' shoes to understand their point of view.
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While I'm not in these parents' shoes, I can totally see why they think sterilization is the way to go. Meet Eliza Robbins who's 16 and was born with high dependency intellectual disability–which pretty much means her parents will be taking care of her for the rest of her (or their) life. According to her mom, Louise, Eliza pretty much goes berserk every time she gets her period. Her distress is such that she has been known to mutilate herself to stop the bleeding, which she obviously doesn't understand.
Nor does she understand the concept of wearing and changing sanitary pads or tampons and every time she gets her period it just adds to the stress the family already feels.
But beside these discomforts, the one thing that would really worry me if I was the parent of an intellectually disabled daughter would be related to someone sexually abusing her and her having to go through an unwanted pregnancy or an abortion.
Now, the Australian government is looking into making sterilization of intellectually disabled girls illegal.
While I believe that no woman should be sterilized without her consent, we're taking about young girls who basically have no clue what's going on around them and whose parents have made every other important decision for them. This one should be no different. In the end, we can all give our opinion, but no one knows what caring for a disabled child is like unless they're going through it.
Image via abc.net.au