College Essay On Down Syndrome

Yvonne Pierre, a great author, once said, “When you focus on someone's disability you'll overlook their abilities, beauty and uniqueness. Once you learn to accept and love them for who they are, you subconsciously learn to love yourself unconditionally”. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act defines intellectual disability as having significantly sub average general intellectual functioning, existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior and manifested during the development period, that adversely affects a child’s educational performance (partnerstx.org, 2015). Down syndrome, also known as trisomy 21 as well as intellectual disability, is defined as a genetic condition in which a person has 47 chromosomes instead of 46.

Hickey, Hickey, and Summar (2012) said that an English doctor named John Langdon Down first discovered Down syndrome in 1862. He termed these people “mongoloids” because they seemed to have the same characteristics of those in the Mongoloid race, which is spread out around Asia. After the 1970s, they stopped using the term “mongoloid” because it was not an accurate description of these individuals and it started to become a hurtful term. President Obama recently passed a legislation that got rid of the term “mentally retarded”. What was known as “mentally retarded” is now known as “intellectual disability”. Most children who had Down syndrome in the past were either killed or abandoned. There are many pictures from the past that display young children with Down syndrome being sacrificed or killed in a horrible way. These individuals were also excluded from society. Often, they were institutionalized in inhumane institutions, and did not receive the care they needed. The eugenic movement in the United States is what motivated German leader, Adolf Hitler to commit mass murder of people who had disabilities, including those who had Down syndrome. Forced sterilization for those who had Down syndrome also became common in most states in the country. Eventually, protests broke out and this sterilization was stopped because people realized it was unethical. In 1959, Jerome Lejeune realized that Down syndrome