(3 of 7)
The procedure has been performed on thousands of women so far and is regarded as safe and effective. If it reveals a flaw early enough in pregnancy, the parents then have the option of abortion. Amniocentesis is elaborate and expensive. However, it should be considered whenever there is an unusually high risk of retardation or other disability. For instance, women over 35 are four times as likely to have mongoloid children as younger mothers. If all older pregnant women were tested and would agree to abortion where warranted the incidence of mongolism could be cut in half. If genetic counseling becomes a widespread practice and related medical services become generally available, retardation resulting from other known, hereditary causes could be sharply reduced.
That kind of defect, however, accounts for only about 20% of the retarded in the U.S. For the other 80%. who are functionally rather than physically retarded, physicians can rarely find precise causes. A growing number of experts believe that this nonspecific, generally milder form of retardation, the primary symptom of which is poor intellectual performance, is a socioeconomic disease. While genetic, chromosomal and hereditary causes occur with about the same frequency in all racial and economic groups, retardation of unknown origin is nearly ten times more likely to occur among the poor, black and Spanish-speaking in the U.S. than among the white and affluent.
The reasons are not racial, according to Dr. Robert Cooke, chief of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. Says Cooke: "Intelligence is controlled by so many genes that it would be biologically impossible to allocate an aggregation of these by race. Since the genetic pattern is essentially the same for all races, we must assume that any differences in intelligence are environmental."
The poor tend to be less healthy and get less prenatal care. An estimated 30% of America's expectant mothers get no medical attention at all, and these are nearly all daughters of poverty. Their children are more likely to be born prematurely, to contract serious diseases during infancy and to suffer from malnutrition during the first three years of life, when 80% of all brain growth takes place. Doctors and educators agree that language, words as a key to handling ideas, is the sine qua non of intelligence. Yet the children of the poor, white or black, are less likely than middle-class youngsters to get the intellectual stimulation essential to their mental development. Some parents in urban and rural ghettos still follow what Mrs. Mary Robinson, director of Baltimore's Martin Luther King Center for Parents and Children, calls a "slave tradition" in child rearing, which inhibits the development of language ability. "We teach our kids to be quiet and not to bother us and not to bother everyone else," says Mrs. Robinson. "We had to do this in order to survive, but we don't have to do it any more. It's killing us."