Roughly 40 percent of Medicaid funding goes to the disabled. Schools currently receive $4-5 billion per year, according to the AASA, an association of school superintendents. That money funds everything from accessible playgrounds to nurses to special education programs.

As adults, people with disabilities depend on Medicaid to see the doctor, to get equipment like wheelchairs, and to get the support that some need to hold jobs and live at home, rather than in nursing homes. Of course, Medicaid pays for nursing homes, too.

My family is middle class — I teach at a small Quaker seminary and my wife works at a high school. We will do our best to give our son the best life he can have, regardless of public supports. Some adults with Down Syndrome achieve high degrees of independence, and he may as well.

The truth, though, is that we don't know – and we simply cannot match the impact of public programs with our own efforts. We lack the expertise, we lack the money, and we also have to work our own jobs.

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Frightening questions also exist. What if we lose our jobs? What happens when our son is an adult? And, scariest of all: what will he do when we are gone?

If we face these fears, imagine what poor families with disabled children are feeling. They, too, have made the deepest kind of pro-life decision: the kind that brings joys but also costs, the kind that affects your life forever, the kind whose daily reality is not captured in political ads.

Ohio has considered bills to mandate such pro-life decisions — by banning abortions based on a Down Syndrome diagnosis. Such bills oversimplify the issue. Because while a prenatal diagnosis can feel scary at first, it can seem positively overwhelming in a society that supports birth but not life.

My son, John Francis, is now 2. His passions include “Baby Signing Time” videos, throwing things off tables, and feeding our dog on the sly. He often laughs for no reason, although he thinks it is particularly hilarious that cows say “moo.”

Any law that protects his birth, but undercuts his future, is not pro-life in any way that matters.

A Roman Catholic, Ben Brazil teaches at the Earlham School of Religion, a Quaker seminary in Richmond, Ind.

‘Frightening questions also exist. What if we lose our jobs? What happens when our son is an adult? And, scariest of all: what will he do when we are gone?’