As word of a UNC medical professor's recent comments regarding abortion of fetuses with Down syndrome reaches us here in eastern North Carolina, I am hardly able to contain my sense of rage.

Professor Albert Harris recently told his vertebrate embryology class that, in his opinion, "the moral thing for older mothers to do is to have amniocentesis as soon during pregnancy as is safe for the fetus, test whether placental cells have a third chromosome #21 and abort the fetus if it does." He went on to say, "I know somebody who had a child like this, and it ruined their life."

My husband and I have not one but two children with special needs: a son with Down syndrome and another son with autism, so we are no strangers to the extra effort needed to parent children with disabilities. We are also the recipients of the immeasurable joy that they have brought into our lives. To say that Harris' statements are infuriating would be an understatement, but it goes deeper than that.

Beyond the surface of these injurious words lies a much larger, insidious societal issue. Now that medical science has enabled us to get a peek at an unborn person's genetic makeup, who decides who is entitled to an existence and who is not? Who determines whose life will have sufficient quality as to justify being born, and whose life should be snuffed out before they see the light of day and get a chance to "ruin" someone else's life?

It wasn't bad enough that Harris inserted his obviously prejudiced personal views into an academic forum where it was inappropriate to do so; he spouted these archaic thoughts based on, as his wife admits, information that was over 30 years old.

Dr. Harris would have us go back to the days when doctors routinely advised parents of newborns with Down syndrome to send them to institutions, only worse. Dr. Harris would have them wiped out altogether. An entire genre of people eradicated like vermin because they contain an extra chromosome. It kind of smacks of a "Hitler" mentality where the disabled are viewed as less than human. I wonder how Dr. Harris would have advised Helen Keller's parents?

The term "special needs" is one that our society uses to define those individuals whose overall functioning falls outside of "the norm." The simple but often overlooked fact is that "special needs" does not translate to mean inferior in any way. It means "differently-abled." Those who are differently-abled should not have to justify their existence to anyone. The value of a human life is not measured by its self-help skills, its IQ score, how ambulatory it is, or how much it contributes to the gross national product. Human life has inestimable worth simply because it exists, and for no other reason.

My son Christopher, a 9-year-old, understands this. Every person he sees is simply a new friend he has yet to meet. This is a child who loves deeply and unconditionally, whose favorite thing to say to his parents is "You're precious." This is a child who never has to have the last word; he only insists on giving the last kiss. As I tuck him into bed each night, I think to myself, "How did I ever get to be so blessed as to be your mother?" Hardly injurious by anyone's definition, and yet, this is a life that Dr. Harris says I had a moral obligation to eliminate.

Christopher totally gets the concept that people's lives have value simply because they exist. Dr. Harris does not.

One has to wonder who has the better quality of life.

Tanya Holland is a

resident of Grandy