When soon-to-be parents find out their child will be born with a severe physical or mental disability, they have to make a serious decision about their ability to support a child with this condition.
Are they capable of taking on the responsibility, should someone else, or should they make the decision to terminate the pregnancy?
If they choose to keep the child, it is expected that they give that child the fullest life they possibly can, despite that child’s disability. For parents who discover the disability after the child is born, it can be even more difficult.
They must change their current way of raising the child to ensure that it is given even more support to grow.
However, according to a recent piece in The New York Times Magazine, some parents are finding ways to raise their child that, while convenient for them, completely inhibit a disabled child’s ability to live as close to a complete life as they can.
Some doctors, at the request of parents, are prescribing disabled children as young as three years old a form of hormone therapy that stunts the child’s growth, therefore making them smaller and, for lack of better words, easier to manage.
The children are given high doses of estrogen, which close the growth plates between their bones, inhibiting their ability to get any larger.
In the 1940s, this growth attenuation treatment was used on girls who were perceived as “getting too tall” to make them shorter and therefore more feminine.
Now, the argument in favor of this treatment is that it is in the best interest of both the children and their parents. Hypothetically, children would be safer if they were smaller, because the caregivers they will need for their whole life could more easily handle them. Parents benefit from this because the strain from caring for a severely disabled child can be mitigated.
But, those parents neglect to realize the great harm the therapy implies.
First of all, referring to the growth attenuation as a “treatment” entails that it is treating an illness, when it is not. A disability is not an illness. It is not something to be treated.
Second, inhibiting a child’s growth physically takes away any chance at agency they could have ever had. It reduces their functionality to that of an infant. Furthermore, a treated child would not have made the choice to stop their growth; it would have had to be forced on them.
Every child, including a disabled child, deserves the chance to grow and evolve.
Disability should not be considered something for a child to live against, but instead something to live with.
meickhof@indiana.edu
@maggie_eickhoff
