Why our girls missed opening day at the softball field

I was a new mother adjusting to life with my third daughter who has Down syndrome in 2002. One of my first ventures outside the house was to my daughter's softball game. I brought my baby Christina in her infant seat in the stroller. I had little experience with public reaction to my daughter, but I felt very uncomfortable with the reaction of the women at the game. I never brought Christina back to the softball games, in fact I avoided them altogether, though I couldn't say exactly how she was rejected, a mother knows. Then, the next year my daughters, ages 9 and 5, weren't invited to enroll for softball.They never participated in their favorite sport again.
Seven years later, I met the wife of the girls softball coach. I didn't have the courage to ask her why my girls were excluded from softball, but she volunteered this story.

"My sister-in-law had made up her mind to abort her daughter with Down syndrome, and I tried to talk her out of it. A  few months after the abortion, she accompanied me to the softball game where you brought your daughter with Down syndrome. She felt so uncomfortable at seeing your daughter, I could never invite your girls to play on the team again."
I feel for that woman's pain, its obvious that she regretted her abortion, and made my family suffer because of it. How much better would she have felt if she gave birth to her little girl and gave her to one of many families seeking to adopt a child with Down syndrome?

if you don't want to raise your baby with Down syndrome, don't abort;
call the National Down Syndrome Adoption Network http://www.ndsan.org/