Global Crisis

Disability continues to be a largely ignored issue in the presidential primaries except for when it comes to gun violence, when the candidates get things entirely wrong. Here's 100% of what Sanders or Clinton (the only candidates that actually might get nominated) said about disability last night.

SANDERS: Let's begin, Anderson, by understanding that Bernie Sanders has a D-minus voting rating from the NRA. Let's also understand that back in 1988 when I first ran for the United States Congress, way back then, I told the gun owners of the state of Vermont and I told the people of the state of Vermont, a state which has virtually no gun control, that I supported a ban on assault weapons. And over the years, I have strongly avoided instant background checks, doing away with this terrible gun show loophole. And I think we've got to move aggressively at the federal level in dealing with the straw man purchasers.

Also I believe, and I've fought for, to understand that there are thousands of people in this country today who are suicidal, who are homicidal, but can't get the healthcare that they need, the mental healthcare, because they don't have insurance or they're too poor. I believe that everybody in this country who has a mental crisis has got to get mental health counseling immediately. 

COOPER: Do you want to shield gun companies from lawsuits?

SANDERS: Of course not. This was a large and complicated bill. There were provisions in it that I think made sense. For example, do I think that a gun shop in the state of Vermont that sells legally a gun to somebody, and that somebody goes out and does something crazy, that that gun shop owner should be held responsible? I don't.
On the other hand, where you have manufacturers and where you have gun shops knowingly giving guns to criminals or aiding and abetting that, of course we should take action.

Sanders needs to stop stigmatizing mental health. He's learned to speak much better about racial injustice (good job activists. And all my white liberal friends who were complaining that BLM activists were unfairly pressuring him, that's why. So he learns). But this stigmatizing of mental health crisis as causally linked to our gun violence, rather than easy access to firearms, when people with mental health issues are vastly  more likely to be victims, has to stop.

I'm delighted to have a candidate advocating for better mental health care - so long as it doesn't involve forced institutionalization or forced medication. But we have to decouple the conversation about mental health from the conversation about gun violence. 

Whatever Sanders' intention, his comments reinforce the notion that gun violence is due to mental illness. We've got to push back hard against that. And Sanders supporters, if they want my vote for their candidate, will need to lead the way. Teach your candidate.

Bruce Holsinger is a medieval literary scholar, a novelist, a public intellectual, and a friend. Here's my review of his novels, political thrillers set in medieval London, with John Gower as the protagonist. You should read them.

How could medieval studies prepare a president for the global struggle against Islamist fundamentalism? Well, Mrs. Fiorina explained, “What ISIS wants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally.”
And did she mean literally. “Every single one of the techniques that ISIS is using,” she elaborated, “the crucifixions, the beheadings, the burning alive, those were commonly used techniques in the Middle Ages.” She added, “ISIS wants to take its territory back to the Middle Ages.”
Sounds familiar. Following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, American political discourse was flooded with this kind of language. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld spoke of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s “medieval vision of the future.” The writer Christopher Hitchens warned of the Taliban’s program of “medieval stultification.” Osama bin Laden himself mastered this medievalist idiom, invoking the Crusades time and again in his polemics against the West.
Mrs. Fiorina’s resort to this sort of garden-variety medievalism represents a failure of historical imagination on at least three levels.

One - ISIS is very, very, modern.

This came across most clearly in Mrs. Fiorina’s address to the Stanford University class of 2001. The most valuable course she took at Stanford, she told the graduates, wasn’t economics or politics, but a seminar called “Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages.”
Each week, she explained, students had to distill what they’d read into a mere two pages: “The rigor of the distillation process, the exercise of refinement, that’s where the real learning happened. It was an incredible, heady skill to master. Through the years, I’ve used it again and again — the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.”
Rarely has the value of humanistic education been defended so eloquently.

Meanwhile, Marco Rubio is snarking about the uselessness of Greek Philosophy. He, of course, studied Political Science in college, a discipline that traces its roots directly back to people like Thucydides and Aristotle.

Rick Perstein, a foremost historian on the rise of the American right, has a long piece on Donald Trump and fascism, comparing his emergence to the politics of other demagogues and fascists throughout the 20th century. It's a thoughtful, detailed, assessment of the risks and the process.

When Trump emerged, many folks started to compare him to Berlusconi, but I continued to suggest that Il Duce was a better model. I stand by that assessment. Here's Perlstein:

Trump has now provided more “specifics” about his immigration plan: a forced population transfer greater than any attempted in history, greater than the French and Spanish expulsions of the Jews in 1308 and 1492; greater than theNabka of approximately 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from British-mandate Palestine; greater than the 1.5 million Stalin consigned to Siberia and the Central Asian republics; greater than Pol Pot’s exile of 2.5 million city-dwellers to the Cambodian countryside, or the scattering of Turkey’s Assyrian Christians, which the scholar Mordechai Zaken says numbers in the millions and required 180 years to complete. Trump has promised to move 12 million Mexicans in under two years––“so fast your head will spin.”
Only then will he start building the wall.
But all Republican politicians say stuff like this, right? They all want a wall, they all want to bury criminals under the jail, they all crave war, even if they’re not quite so explicit about it.
Not quite, actually. Previous Republican leaders were sufficiently frightened by the daemonic anger that energized their constituencies that they avoided surrendering to it completely, even for political advantage. Think of Barry Goldwater, who was so frightened of the racists supporting him that he told Lyndon Johnson he’d drop out of the race if they started making race riots a campaign issue. And Ronald Reagan refusing to back a 1978 ballot initiative to fire gay schoolteachers in California, at a time vigilantes were hunting down gays in the street. Think of George W. Bush guiding Congress toward a comprehensive immigration bill (akin to that proposed by President Obama) until the onslaught of vitriol that talk-radio hosts directed at Republican members of Congress forced him to quit. Think of George W. Bush’s repeated references to Islam as a “religion of peace.”

That's right, W. was the responsible one. Trump is much more dangerous. Trump is also not doctrinally conservative when it comes to economics, but rather has grasped the power of economic demagoguery.

Describe Donald Trump to a mid-century social scientist and he would respond: of course he is in first place. And I’m fairly certain George W. Bush would fully understand that he could have further expanded his own massive grant of post-9/11 power were he only to scapegoat all Muslims. It is to his great credit that he did not. He seemed to have understood something the current crop of Republican candidates chasing after Trump do not—something about Pandora’s Boxes, toothpaste that cannot be put back into tubes, the demiurge. Bush was, unlike Donald Trump, unwilling to say anything.
...
Our notional midcentury social scientist, or better historically informed pundits, wouldn’t be so sanguine. They would recognize the phenomenon that sociologist Pierre van den Berghe in 1967 labeled herrenvolk democracy: a political ideology in which members of the dominant ethnic group enjoy privileged provision from the state, as a function of the economic and civic disenfranchisement of the scapegoated group, to better cement dictatorship. This was why elites feared Huey Long’s promise of a guaranteed income––“Every Man A King.” This was how George Wallace governed Alabama. This was apartheid South Africa.

Read the whole thing. I still can't believe Trump will win the nomination, let alone the election. But a savvier politician, perhaps also a billionaire, will come along who appropriates these pieces and will win. History tells us to be worried about that future.

Image Description: Me on CNN. Michigan Ave/Chicago River behind me. David Perry: Associate Professor, Dominican University Headline: Oregon Massacre, Campus Shooter Kills 9, Wounds 9

I went on CNN on Friday, 10/1, to discuss the terrible shooting on a community college campus in Oregon. CNN hasn't released a clip so I can't show it to you.

I'm glad to have had the chance to go on the air and say some of the things I believe. I was originally supposed to be paired with John Lott, a man who believes that more guns equals less crime (they don't). The show decided instead to separate us and so by the time I came on, the host wanted to talk about other things. I had about 90 seconds and said three sentences. I described our upcoming active-shooter drill at Dominican, about which I will write next week. I said that I do not want guns on campus.  I said that I do not believe adding more guns in the form of armed civilians will make us safer. Then my segment ended fairly abruptly.

At any rate, 90 seconds is a difficult time to make one's stance perfectly clear. Here are four things I wish I could have said more clearly on CNN.

1. I have no problem with highly-trained law enforcement positioned appropriately near campuses. Some universities are basically cities unto themselves, so they likely need their own armed police. My small suburban campus needs to coordinate its security with our small suburban police, the tactical units assigned to our area, and other highly-trained law enforcement officers.

2. I do not believe that allowing civilians, whether teachers, staff, faculty, or just random visitors, to carry arms on our campus is the right response. First, college campuses are sacred spaces to me, and I do not want to see them further profaned by these weapons of murder. More importantly, though, we cannot arm our way out of this crisis. If we turn every school into a fortress, mass shootings will move to the malls. Arm the malls, killers will go the churches. Arm the churches, then it will be little league games. We can take appropriate measures to defend against copycat killers, but cannot stop gun violence by reacting to the specifics of the last attack.

3. Around the world, there are people who are angry and potentially violent. People hate other people. People get personally slighted. People have mental health breakdowns (though people with mental illness are vastly more likely to be victims than perpetrators of violence). It's only in America that these individuals are likely to react to their anger by using a firearm to commit an act of mass murder.

4. The only solution is to find ways to make access to firearms more difficult for people in those moments. There are simple steps - ban assault weapons, close gun show loopholes, expand background checks and waiting periods, share information across state lines, slow down the ability to purchase lots of handguns at once (used to buy from suburban gun shops and bring to illegal urban markets), and remove the Congressional ban on government-sponsored research on gun violence. None of these steps will restrict the ability of Americans to acquire firearms to hunt, for home defense, or even for conceal-carry purposes. But it will slow the flow, and that's what we need right now.

We cannot arm our way out of this crisis.

Some resources on gun violence. Whitehouse.gov on gun violence.

Say goodbye to the Illinois History Museum. Bruce Rauner has pulled the plug.

I have a bunch of pieces out in various stages of edits, and hope to have 3 or 4 pieces published next week. This week I had only one, a new Game of Thrones piece for Vice. I think the changing relationship between the books and the show is interesting. Eventually, the show will become canon, if indeed it hasn't already. 

This is a collection of links about Republican cuts to programs serving people with disabilities, as well as comments from Republican officials/candidates questioning the rationales behind such programs.

Resource pages offer collections of links for pieces I am writing, usually without comment. The comment comes in the piece I write later. Please suggest other links via social media, email, or in comments.

Bruce Rauner (Illinois)

• Proposes cuts to respite care.
• Proposes cuts to early intervention.

Scott Walker (Wisconsin)

• Walker cuts "Family Care" plan, closing options.
• Walker cuts long-term care services.
• Disability Rights Wisconsin has a call out for people affected by Wisconsin cuts to share their stories at upcoming hearings, along with budget numbers.

Over the border from me, the Scott Walker experiment to dismantle the state of Wisconsin continues. He wants to create Kansas-North. Conservatives are loving it, and he's just the kind of boring white guy with an allegedly criminal past that the GOP establishment might nominate for president.

Not long after President Obama unveiled his ideas for Free Community College, a proposal that, among other things, articulates a vision of public education as a common good, Walker has come out with his own brilliant plan for higher ed - more NBA Arenas.

In the last few days, Walker has proposed a 300 million dollar budget cut for the UW system. At the same time, he's proposed a 220 million dollar giveaway to the Milwaukee Bucks, owned, like all NBA teams, by one of the richest humans in the history of the world. The Republican love for corporate welfare knows no limits (and it's a smart investment, as the masters of the universe turn around to fund their campaigns and hire them after their political career is over), and Democrats are equally willing to shill for pro-sports teams (the new Vikings stadium in downtown Minneapolis is going to be a neat place, except for the bird-killing). Still, to have these simultaneous announcements come out from the Walker administration does reveal their priorities fairly neatly.

Corporate welfare = "An investment." In the link above, Walker talks about how much money the NBA team brings to Milwaulkee.

Higher Ed Cuts = Making the UW system "more independent." Indeed, so independent he's stripping out tenure and faculty governance from state law, so that his appointed Regents can chip away at a world-class network of institutions.

To lose an NBA team means losing tax revenue, to be sure, although in general stadiums create only service jobs and concentrate entertainment revenue in a certain spot, rather than create more revenue. I wonder, though, how much revenue Wisconsin will lose over time with a less-educated citizenry? It will be less quantifiable. It won't involve any billionaires. It will come, though.

As my bandmate Kurt said, That Ain't Right.



Meanwhile, I love that one of my hero bands, the Dropkick Murphys - union lovers and Southie Boston working men all, called out Walker for using their music for his intro (seriously, GOP, you get most country music and Ted Nugent and that's it).

Basic principle: The fight for basic economic justice for everyone is the fight for better lives for people with disabilities. #SOTU4PWD
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 21, 2015

Yesterday President Obama mentioned "Americans with mental illness or physical disability" as part of his long list of inclusive terms. This is not my preferred language. It excludes my son, who has neither a mental illness nor a physical disability (he has an intellectual disability). It excludes a lot of people, and moreover separates people into categories in ways I find unhelpful. Still, it's good to see some entry disability in inclusive language in such a high profile address.

On Twitter, #SOTU4PWD (State of the Union for People With Disabilities) contains an ongoing discussion of that clause and what it might mean.

Here's my contribution, or at least some opening thoughts. Comments always welcome.

We are in an era of intensifying income inequality matched with political movements that want to shred safety nets and basic supports. Fights against those political movements and in favor of greater equality are, it turns out, fights for better lives for people with disabilities.

It's vital to keep this in mind, because in the U.S., the GOP plan is to divide and conquer. They play off the disabled vs the poor, the poor vs the elderly, the chronically disabled vs those hurt on the job, people with Down syndrome vs people with Schizophrenia, and more. If your political philosophy despises concepts like universal healthcare, social security, and basic income guarantees - and the GOP despises these - divide and conquer is the politically viable way to fight otherwise popular program.

So they have pitted Medicare vs the Affordable Care Act. Social Security for the elderly vs for the disabled. People with disabilities diagnosed under age 26 vs people with disabilities diagnosed after 26. The alleged "fakers" on SSDI vs the worthy disabled. The working poor vs the not working poor.

We fight back by refusing to be divided. Good policy is good policy and should be available to all. The fight for economic justice is the fight for disability rights.

At the same time, we have to advocate for our specific causes and specific needs, lest be rendered invisible. We need the president to nod to disability in his speech, if he's going to list problems. We need to demand that he say, as he did, "transgender," the first time that word appeared in a State of the Union.We need to make #BlackLivesMatter, rather then letting it fall into the softer, meaningless, all lives matter (because all lives do matter, but black lives are specifically treated as disposable). We need to be specific.

The way to be both specific and universal is called intersectionality. I write about it a lot - on abortion, on police violence, on mass killings, and so forth. It's a frame of mind, a mode of argument, and an analytical tool that pushes you to both see the specific issue at hand, not derail it, but link it to other kinds of issues.

In fact, intersectionality demands that we make these kinds of links, emerging from black feminist
arguments that we had to focus on race AND gender. Disability AND poverty. Poverty AND race. Etc.

Intersectional disability studies enables the focus on specific needs and reforms that people with disabilities require, but also keeps us from demanding that our issue, whatever it is, is explicitly on the table all the time. When people are marching because black lives do matter, people in the disability community don't have to say - why aren't you marching for us? Instead, we rally together, because your fight is our fight.

Your fight is our fight.

The fight for economic justice, in whatever form it takes, is the fight for disability rights. And the fight for disability rights, in whatever form it takes, should matter equally to those outside the community, working for economic justice.

For the next few days, Community Colleges will be in the news, thanks to the president's proposal. #FreeCommunityCollege was the top trending hashtag in the U.S. yesterday. There are lots of news reports and surely hundreds of think pieces to come.

My basic assessment is that it's a good plan that if enacted, because it's not a "last dollar" plan (i.e. the money only comes after other means have been exhausted) will make 2 years of college more affordable for many Americans. It will undermine the for-profit market as well as the Frankenstein ASU-style for-profit wing of non-profits. The devil is in the details, but I'm pleased.

And now, dear fellow academics, here's the thing for which we must lobby.

These new students need to be taught by full-time, salaried, faculty.

If we're going to claim that Community College is a pathway towards a better life, better wages, better education. If we're going to claim that public education is a public good. If we're going to invest federal money in making higher education accessible. Shouldn't we then demand that the people doing the actual teaching are fully supported? They must make a living wage. They need health care. They need access to faculty development. They need offices.

We do this for the students. And we're going to hear a lot about the students in the next few days and weeks.

We do this for basic economic justice.

We do this for the profession.

We have to demand that this new investment in community colleges arrives with an appropriate investment in instruction.

My baseline, at the moment - Any school receiving funding for the America's College Promise must have 80% full-time faculty.

This is one of those moments in which a unified voice can have an impact, so let's start speaking up.

Update: Thanks to New Faculty Majority, I got a link to this report on the state of community colleges as of 2012. A shocking 70% of all faculty are part-timers. Yes, some of those will be people who only want to teach a course or two while working at some other profession, but most are adjunct profs trying to scrape together a living.

I'm still waiting on documents to arrive for the NEH as I'd like a much clearer assessment of who is making decisions over there.

I'm angry, as well, that they aren't more forthcoming. The NEH belongs to us. It belongs to everyone who has participated in an NEH program or applied for one. It belongs to every citizen that works in the humanities at any level. It belongs to the taxpayers. And that's why FOIA exists, to force transparency when craven bureaucrats hide their process and make statements that seem untrue. I'm not famous. I'm not important. And I can't get answers by simply asking reasonable questions. And so I wait for documents.

In the meantime, my attention on Jeff Sessions is intensifying. I think a lot of people dismiss him as an anti-intellectual crank, but he's quite sophisticated at speaking to people who are, at the first, suspicious of the humanities, and who are suspicious of federal support for research of any kind except for the most pragmatic (and military).

Sessions is the ranking GOP member of the Senate Budget Committee. In a few days, he could be the incoming chair of the Senate Budget Committee. At which point, every budget emerging from his committee will include little to no funding for basic research of all kinds. The NEH and NEA are obvious targets, but the NIH is going to be in trouble too. It's all bad for knowledge.

So if there's a GOP Senate, that's not going to be fun. In such an environment, though, targeted groups cannot respond to pressure through this behind-the-scenes fait accompli kind of a decision making. They have to gather stakeholders in, make us feel part of the process, make us feel like the NEH is something worth fighting for.

And right now, when Sessions says cut the NEH, my emotional response (not rational response) is to shrug and say, "whatever." Because it's pretty clear, right now, that the big fancy folks at Washington don't care about my voice. Or your voice. It's not our NEH, so why not just let Sessions gut it.

I will try to resist such emotional responses, but none of this was necessary. The NEH could have contacted its program Directors (and through them past participants) and said - "we have this series of bad choices and are trying to figure out what's the least bad response. One thought was to cancel foreign programs for the following reasons..."

In such a circumstance, they build community and sympathy for making hard budget choices. But they also then have to be transparent about what those choices actually are and I fundamentally don't believe they have been.

• To my knowledge, they aren't really saving much money (and possibly not any money) by cutting the program. 
• To my knowledge, the foreign seminars attract more applicants than the domestic ones, so the NEH's suggestion that this is about access doesn't stand up. 
• To my knowledge, the NEH foreign seminars consistently produce books, conference sessions, and career-changing/sparking moments in ways that they would have not have without their on-site location.

On CNN last Sunday, Stephanie Miller used Fiorina’s degree in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford as an easy way to score a rhetorical point. Miller argued that the Republicans, especially in their views on women, are medieval, and medieval things, as everyone knows, are bad.

14th-c drawing meant to depict "Trotula," a female doctor. Miscellanea medica XVIII Wellcome Library, London. CC-zero

Nancy McCrea Iannone argues that the new Louisiana law on pre-natal testing inserts abortion politics into what had been a non-partisan movement by forbidding health-care providers to present termination as a neutral or acceptable choice. 

Comments from David Perry on this post can be found here.

Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, Pro-Information: Proceed with Caution

by Nancy McCrea Iannone.

The Louisiana Legislature recently passed a law requiring health care providers to provide information to expectant parents receiving a Down syndrome diagnosis. While the law follows the positive and rising "pro-information" trend among the states, the Louisiana statute deviates from this trend significantly. Louisiana added a requirement that the information the Department of Health and Hospitals gives to health care providers, and which the providers are required to give out to patients, "cannot explicitly or implicitly present termination as a neutral or acceptable choice."

"Pro-information" is the word that many members of the Down syndrome community have used to describe the movement in support of expectant parents receiving accurate, balanced, and up-to-date information about Down syndrome after a prenatal diagnosis. The pro-information movement includes both pro-life and pro-choice members, united in the common mission of supporting and informing expectant parents.

Louisiana has taken an efficient, unifying model pro-information law and has tinkered with it, creating a situation which is more complicated for health care providers and potentially much worse for parents receiving a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. In the history of the pro-information movement, Louisiana's actions stand out as a major and harmful setback. Recent history provides the context for Louisiana's legislation as well as solutions for the problems this legislation creates.


In 2007, two senators from opposite ends of the political spectrum introduced the "Kennedy Brownback bill," a pro-information bill. It required health care providers to provide up-to-date detailed information to parents receiving a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis. Sometime after it unanimously passed the Health Committee, the language was altered. The requirement placed on health care providers was deleted, and in its place appeared a much softer directive to the Secretary of Health to provide funds to a "grantee" who would, among other things, provide patient resources to health care providers. Written in this way, the Prenatally and Postnatally Diagnosed Conditions Awareness Act passed. Its passage excited advocates for people with disabilities, but as the bill was weakened and never funded, it had no impact on a federal level.

As advocates realized the failings of the federal law, individuals and organizations in various states proposed legislation to their lawmakers. The proposed language mirrored that of the original Kennedy Brownback bill, requiring health care providers to provide certain information to their patients receiving a diagnosis. Now, states such as Massachusetts and Kentucky require physicians to provide up-to-date information which has been reviewed by Down syndrome organizations as well as medical experts. This criteria was written with the Kennedy Foundation's booklet "Understanding a Down Syndrome Diagnosis" in mind, a booklet edited with input from representatives of major medical groups and national Down syndrome groups. It covers all pregnancy options, including termination, as was required by participating medical groups and understood by the Down syndrome groups.


Louisiana's exclusion of termination in its state-mandated Down syndrome materials flies in the face of national, historic efforts to provide a unified approach to prenatal information and it threatens to harm the cause of providing accurate, up-to-date information to pregnant women and their health care providers. Beyond destroying the original unity between left and right, beyond ignoring the hard-fought consensus among representatives of medical and Down syndrome groups, Louisiana's legislation creates a very difficult situation for providers and patients alike. While providers in Louisiana are now bound by statute to distribute termination-free information, they are equally bound by law and professional ethics to inform patients about the option of termination. Louisiana is one of the many states in the country which recognizes wrongful birth/ life claims, which leaves providers who fail to provide diagnosis and termination information subject to liability. Such lawsuits use standard of care as a guide. Providers look to professional organizations such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the National Society of Genetic Counselors for such standards. These organizations include termination as information which must be provided to patients after diagnosis.

Thus in order to meet all of their legal obligations, Louisiana health care providers must give out the termination-free materials provided by the state, and also separate termination-present information. What form will the latter take? Will it present the option of termination delicately and neutrally as the Kennedy Foundation's booklet does? Or will providers look for strongly-worded pro-termination information to balance the perceived pro-life information provided by the state? Or will providers talk of termination with whatever bias they already have, be it a pro-life, neutral, or pro-termination stance?

In Louisiana and in other parts of the country, the short-sighted efforts of some advocates are set to backfire. They are desperately working to purge prenatal information of all mention of termination, even in neutral form which provides evidence-based information about the possible emotional impact of termination after diagnosis. In doing so, they seek to give up that neutral presentation of termination in favor of a presentation which will vary wildly among health care professionals depending on their biases. This is an enormous set-back to the "pro-information" cause, brings the credibility of Down syndrome information into question due to the perception of a "pro-life" slant, and leaves the field wide open for an unpredictable variety of termination materials given to expectant parents.

Hopefully, health care providers in Louisiana will supplement the state-forced materials with the Kennedy Foundation's booklet, which will allow them to meet all legal and ethical obligations and still present neutral information. These booklets are the only booklets to be recommended in the guidelines of both National Society of Genetic Counselors and American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics. These booklets can be obtained at Lettercase.org.

In the meantime, various states across the country continue to consider and pass legislation which hold true to the original mission of a unified approach to prenatal information. You can keep track of these efforts here on Mark Leach's blog DownSyndromePrenatalTesting.com.

The Louisiana legislation will prove logistically problematic for health care providers in that state who wish to provide accurate, balanced, neutral information while meeting their legal and ethical obligations. More worrisome is the potential impact on the rest of the states if Louisiana's actions cause a ripple effect. The pro-information movement has been able to keep itself relatively free from partisan divisions because of the priority of providing accurate, medically approved materials to expectant parents. If there are more versions of "pro-information" legislation which exclude even neutral mention of termination, the movement may be destined to disintegrate into the typical red state/ blue state divisions. Advocates can prevent this by being aware of the potential implications of tinkering with the model language, and advising their lawmakers to keep focused on the goal of providing accurate, balanced information to expectant parents.

Nancy McCrea Iannone has been providing active support to expectant parents on Baby Center’s Down Syndrome Pregnancy discussion board since 2006. The story of her daughter’s birth is contained in Gifts: Mothers Reflect on How Children with Down Syndrome Enrich Their Lives (“A Hopeful Future”) and Gifts II: How People with Down Syndrome Enrich the World (“An Enlightening Snow Day”). Nancy is the co-author of the book Diagnosis to Delivery: A Pregnant Mother’s Guide to Down Syndrome and the booklet “Your Loved One is Having a Baby with Down Syndrome.” Both of these publications and additional resources can be found at DownSyndromePregnancy.org, part of the National Center for Prenatal and Postnatal Down Syndrome Resources.

Amy Julia Becker provided editorial assistance for this post.