For the makers of Ellie Simmonds’ new documentary, Should I Have Children?, the most powerful moment of the show is clearly supposed to be when she finds out why she was given up for adoption. It is emotional viewing: her birth mother speaks of her difficult circumstances (she had kept her pregnancy secret), the purely negative information she had been given about Ellie’s dwarfism, and, most poignantly, how she thought of Ellie every day in the decades before they met again. It is deeply moving, for Ellie and the viewer.
For me, though, the most powerful moment is altogether less charged. It comes when Ellie visits David and Megan, whose pregnancy she follows after they are told their baby almost certainly has Down’s syndrome. We watch them grapple with the ramifications of the diagnosis including their fears for the child’s future and the decision about whether to terminate the pregnancy (90% of pregnancies involving a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome are now terminated). David talks movingly of struggling with the idea of his child being bullied. Yet when Ellie visits them at home, everything has changed: the baby is there, and the couple are clearly smitten. “All the worry completely evaporates the minute you see her for the first time,” David says, in an ordinary expression of fatherly love that is also a powerful statement about how the reality of disability is so often removed from the fear it provokes.
