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Does this mean that nothing can and must interfere with a retarded person's basic human right to relationship with the other sex, to marry and to have children? By no means. The Declaration on the Rights of the Mentally Retarded Persons has a very important clause in Article 7, which reads as follows:

Some mentally retarded persons may be unable, due to the severity of their handicap, to exercise for themselves all of their rights in a meaningful way. For others, modification of some or all of these rights is appropriate. The procedure used for modification or denial of rights must contain proper legal safeguards against every form of abuse, must be based on an evaluation of the social capability of the mentally retarded person by qualified experts and must be subject to periodic reviews and to the right of appeal to higher authorities.

In other words, one can appeal to the court for sterilization, but the term "proper legal safeguards" would imply that the judge in each case would inquire whether less radical steps could be used, such as proper sex education and birth control measures.

It is not hard for me to guess that quite a few persons in this audience will respond with distinct impatience to all these elaborate measures of safeguarding the interests of persons who appear obviously incompetent in the exercise of common life patterns. Two important points need to be made here: the first one is that we have increasing evidence that in the past we have grossly underestimated the functional capacities of severely retarded individuals, and persons like John DuRand and Marc Gold are providing some of this exciting new evidence. The second point is that the presumed incompetence of severely retarded persons has been the direct result of our failure to teach them, and of our depriving them of stimulating environments, and nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in our traditional large institutions.

Our concern with basic human rights of mentally retarded persons has gained additional significance with recent developments, led, unfortunately, by some scholars in the fields of ethics in the USA but reflected in other countries as well. What we are witnessing are attempts to prove that human rights can safely be disregarded with profoundly retarded individuals because, so it is claimed, they are not to be considered human; and therefore there should be no prohibition against any measure of controlling them, including killing them. One of these scholars. Professor Joseph Fletcher, goes one step farther and claims that a second group, not quite so profoundly retarded, should be considered as "semi-humans," entitled only to minimal care and protection (Fletcher, 1972). Nor is this to be considered a purely philosophical argument among scholars. We have evidence freely given by physicians in leading hospitals that they have put infants to death for the only reason that they were afflicted with Down's Syndrome.

The key point I would like to put before you is this: once we deny basic human rights to any group of retarded people, we cannot avoid having opened a Pandora's box. We cannot avoid a general devaluation of all mentally retarded persons; indeed, this is but a first step down the path of Adolf Hitler's policies. Once we allow parents to sterilize their young retarded children on the basis of one set of circumstances we open the way to other measures directed at other types of cases, and the hysterectomy as a means of avoiding hygienic inconvenience is a telling example.

I have made references several times in the foregoing remarks to parents and their relationship to their retarded child. Lest I be misunderstood, I would like to add here some further comments on the great significance which I ascribe to the parent-child relationship, because one of the most deeply ingrained human rights in your country and mine is the right to live with one's own parents, in the protective circle of the family. Moreover, the past several years have brought us a great deal of compelling evidence that parents can and must assume a significant partnership role in any program sponsored by any agency on behalf of their children, particularly, of course, during their early years. I make a special point about this because often when I discuss with parent groups the rights of retarded persons, some parents inevitably raise the question "Do we as parents have no rights at all?" Most definitely, such rights exist and must be acknowledged; some of you heard me discuss, for instance, the new special education law in my State of Massachusetts, which spells out in great detail the right of parents not just to be informed but to participate in decision-making concerning the school program of their child. But this importance of the relationship between child and parents, and the great supportive value of the family situation must -- in terms of the child -- be seen as a basic human right to live with one's family, and this should imply a right for assistance to the family from the appropriate outside agencies so that the child can receive proper care. In other words, care away from home should take place only when all means have been exhausted to bring to the family necessary help. And as you are well aware, British Columbia, along with all other provinces, has barely scratched the surface in applying well known, proven measures of supporting a family in raising their retarded child at home. Rather, the Province, for its own convenience, prefers to maintain easily managed large institutions -- with results I need not go into here.