Denver, Colo., Dec 21, 2020 / 07:15 am (CNA).- In a first-of-its-kind initiative, a Catholic-run healthcare practice in Colorado will partner with a major foundation based in Paris to bring specialized medical care to adults with Down syndrome.
Bella Health & Wellness, a practice based in the Denver suburb of Englewood, Colorado, announced at a Dec. 3 fundraiser that they will partner with the Jerome Lejeune Foundation, a French organization named for the pro-life doctor who discovered the genetic cause of Down syndrome in the 1950s.
Dede Chism, Bella’s co-founder and executive director, told CNA that the Lejeune Foundation was looking to partner with a medical practice in the United States that shared their ethos.
“The biggest thing is really believing in one another’s mission. We really believe in the mission of Lejeune and the mission of life…to be able to augment one another’s capacity to care by joining forces in any way that we can,” Chism told CNA.
Named for Servant of God Jérôme Lejeune, a French pediatrician and geneticist, the Lejeune Foundation aims to provide research, care, and advocacy for people with genetic intellectual disabilities. The foundation currently operates the largest medical center for people with Down syndrome in the world, located in Paris.
Bella opened in December 2014 as a non-profit medical practice, founded by Chism and her daughter Abby Sinnett, both of whom are nurse practitioners, with the goal of taking a holistic approach to caring for women in mind, body, and spirit.
The practice is run in full alignment with Church teaching, although it attracts non-Catholics as well, particularly those drawn to the clinic’s natural and scientific approach. Some areas of focus for the clinic include obstetrics, annual exams, gynecology, infertility treatment, menopause care, and abortion pill reversal.
Over the years, the practice has expanded its scope to offer care for men and children as well as for women, with services such as well child check ups, management of chronic illness, and COVID-19 testing.
One of the important facets of Bella’s work is care for pregnant mothers, and Chism said they are already adept at meeting the medical needs of mothers who are carrying babies with Down syndrome.
The new partnership will enable Bella to care for adult patients who have Down syndrome, she said. Bella will help Lejeune learn more about how medicine in the United States works, while the Foundation’s knowledge of how to care for people with Down syndrome, passed on to Bella’s staff through mentorships, will greatly benefit Bella’s medical practice.
“We know that there is an identified need, and we are going to be there to fill it,” she said.
Chism said they expect to begin serving their first patients with Down syndrome on March 21, 2021. March 21 has been marked as World Down Syndrome Day by the United Nations since 2012.
Dr. Lejeune, a devout Catholic, discovered the genetic cause for Down syndrome— an extra copy of chromosome 21— in 1958.
He spent the rest of his life researching treatments and cures for the condition— also known as trisomy 21— advocating strongly against the use of prenatal testing and the abortion of unborn children who were found to have Down syndrome.
Chism commented that before Lejeune’s discovery, people generally thought there was something “missing” from people with Down syndrome, but Lejeune found that there was “nothing missing at all.” Rather, “God chose to write a second sentence in the DNA of Down syndrome people.”
Kieth Mason, executive director of the Jerome Lejeune Foundation USA, told CNA that the foundation chose Bella as their first medical practice partner in the United States because of a shared reverence for the dignity of the human person.
Denver is already home to the Anna and John J. Sie Center for Down Syndrome at Children’s Hospital Colorado, as well as the Global Down Syndrome Foundation, a major advocacy organization.
Currently however, Mason said, there is no freestanding medical center in the United States for people with Down syndrome older than 21. Most specialized clinics— of which there are about a dozen throughout the country— are pediatric. The partnership with Bella will aim to change that, he said.
The Lejeune Foundation operates the largest DNA database in the world, Mason said, and they base their specialized care for people with Down syndrome on many years of research. Research by the foundation is likely to yield positive results not only for people with Down syndrome, but for all people, he noted.
For example, it is very common for people with Down syndrome to get Alzheimers, so the foundation is doing a lot of research into how to lessen the impact of the disease. On the other hand, women with Down syndrome appear to be protected from contracting breast cancer, so research into this area could benefit all humanity, he said.
Mason said he fully expects Bella to attract interest from patients across the country, just as their clinic in Paris attracts patients from across Europe and the world.
Mason’s daughter Maria, who has Down syndrome, will be one of the first people to receive specialized medical care at the Denver clinic, he said.
“As we care for people with Down syndrome, they care for us. They minister to our hearts and show us what true joy is,” he commented.
Lejeune was a personal friend of Pope St. John Paul II. In 1994, the pope named him the first president of the then brand-new Pontifical Academy for Life.
Lejeune died of lung cancer on Easter Saturday 1994. His canonization cause was opened in 2007.
Madame Berthe Lejeune, Dr. Lejeune’s widow, has said her husband was heartbroken that many doctors and governments used his discovery to “screen out” babies with Down syndrome, targeting them for abortion.
“He thought that all doctors would be happy to find research to cure them,” Madame Lejeune told EWTN Pro-Life Weekly in 2017.
“But sadly, all government[s], not only in France, said: oh, it’s a wonderful discovery. You can detect these little sick children before they are born, and so take them away with an abortion.”
Madame Lejeune died in May 2020, also of lung cancer.
The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has consistently criticized countries which provide for abortion on the basis of disability. In some countries, such as Denmark and Iceland, the abortion rate for babies found to have Down syndrome is close to 100%.
In the United States, there have been numerous attempts at the state level to ban abortions based on a diagnosis of Down syndrome.
Missouri lawmakers passed a law during 2019 that, in addition to banning all abortions after eight weeks, prohibits “selective” abortions following a medical diagnosis or disability such as Down syndrome, or on the basis of the race or sex of the baby. The law is currently blocked in the courts amid a legal challenge.
Ohio lawmakers attempted in 2017 to pass a ban on Down syndrome abortions, but a federal judge in 2019 blocked the legislation from taking effect.
Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, North Dakota, and Utah have all considered or passed similar bans.
At the federal level, the Down Syndrome Discrimination by Abortion Prohibition Act has been introduced in Congress, but has not yet been debated. The proposed law would ban doctors from “knowingly perform[ing] an abortion being sought because the baby has or may have Down syndrome.”
[…]
““As a founding principle of our country, we have always welcomed immigrant and refugee populations, and through the social services and good works of the Church, we have accompanied our brothers and sisters in integrating to daily American life,” Bishop Mario Dorsonville, auxiliary bishop of Washington and chair of the US bishops’ Comittee on Migration, said Jan. 2.”
Someone needs to take a remedial US history class.
SOL,
Which part of US history did you think they need a remedial class on?
Who are most Americans originally if not immigrants?
I’d agree it’s not correct to say that we have always, at all times welcomed immigrants and refugees but we certainly have done that selectively. And Catholics have for the greater part been among the groups of immigrants not warmly welcomed.
We need immigration to counteract the current birth dearth but we don’t have to have open borders or risk our national security. There should be a reasonable and humane approach to immigration.
Has it occurred to you that mass immigration is a cause of the drop in birthrates? By driving up the cost of living (housing, heath care, taxes, etc.), while depressing wages, it makes family formation so much more difficult.
Tony,
Birthrates are plummeting globally with or without immigration. Even government incentives to have a replacement level birthrate have failed.
Hungary is offering tax incentives for families and hopefully they’ll have some success.
Mrscracker,
The founding American people were not immigrants but colonists/settlers. They didn’t enter into a pre-existing polity and receive citizenship or some other form of membership from another people. The whole “America is a land of immigrants” myth was created by leftist subversives even if used by 20th ce nationalists for their own purposes after the fact, more than 3 centuries after the first British colonists started settling this country. Many of the founding fathers after the revolution even explicitly wrote on the question of whether anyone non-British should be allowed to immigrate to the US.
This original Anglo-American (and Protestant Christian) heritage and identity is what the left is trying to erase and unfortunately too many Catholic bishops are assisting in this, even if the bishops seek to replace it with some vague “Catholic” identity.
This system is currently in a stage of collapse, and continued immigration will further destabilization and increase the likelihood of wide-scale violence, regardless of how necessary believers in infinite economic growth say immigrants are for that.
SOL,
Good morning!
My daddy’s side of the family has been here for 400 years. I went to the UK a few years ago and visited the parish church of a 17th century colonial ancestor. In his memorial he’s referred to as “Henry the Immigrant” because he migrated to the American Colonies.
🙂
You know, the longer your ancestors have lived in North America the more likely you are to find non Anglo Saxon ancestry or ancestors who came as convicts. The American colonies were a dumping ground for thousands of British convicts until the Revolutionary War. After that, the British had to turn to Australia and Tasmania to dump their unwanted.
Beyond chattel slavery, folks of African ancestry have been here for 400 plus years. Many were free people of color and many intermarried with white colonists.
And of course, our American Indians have their own perspectives on immigration.
History is complicated and the more you look at it, the more humble you feel. Most of us have very modest beginnings and sometimes, we find very surprising narratives along the way.
Your argument seems to be that, since we are all the descendants of immigrants (in the broadest sense of the word), there is no justification for this nation (or really, any nation) to have a restrictive immigration policy. Apparently, this Ellis Island sentimentalism must override all other political, social, cultural and economic considerations. Does a country have a right to try to maintain its ethnic and cultural balance by limiting who is allowed in?
More mindless, liberal rubbish from bishops who seem utterly incapable of, not to mention unwilling to, speak in anything other than left wing cliches. Will they ever declare solidarity with the American people?
Looked up the bishop in question.
Wikipedia: Mario Eduardo Dorsonville-Rodríguez (born October 31, 1960) is a Colombian-born bishop of the Catholic Church in the United States.
Like Jose Gomez, another immigrant who is presumptuous enough to lecture Americans about American history and identity.
Thanks for the information. I suppose the good bishop has admonished the elites in Colombia on the need to clean up the corruption and to improve the nation’s economy that has apparently created such intolerable conditions.
Wish the bishops (and the nuns!!) would show a little solidarity with the dyslexic/dyscalculaic/etc community.
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Just because dyslexics frequently have high intelligence does not mean they all go to MIT and walk out with $75,000 starting income.
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Many suffer socially as well as educationally and the job situation upon adulthood can look bleak. As many prisoners are dyslexic, I think it is a good bet if it was caught early in school, we’d have fewer children in trouble and fewer adults in prison.
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I mean no ill will toward those looking for a better life, but we have plenty of hurting children/adults who were born here. Don’t they deserve the same concern?
Tony,
North Americans, with the exception of those descended from our Indian tribes, are all the product of quite diverse immigrant populations from the past 400-500 years. I dislike the term “diverse ” because it’s become a cliche, but it really does describe our immigrant history.
I don’t think race or ethnicity should even enter into a Catholic conversation regarding what to conserve in America. Color and ethnicity simply don’t signify but culture does.
A Judeo Christian culture is what conservative Christians and others should be concerned about preserving. Not Anglo Saxonism. Culture, not color is what’s critical.
And yes, I strongly believe that sovereign nations have a right to secure their borders and enforce immigration laws. And preserve their unique cultures. But you have to have enough population to ensure a functioning society to pass that culture down to. Societies that are ageing and not reproducing themselves won’t be capable of that and will eventually be replaced.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Immigrants – they are ambassadors of the Good News.
All of them? How so? In what way?