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Seven year-old Nika brims over with life, dancing and singing her way around the kitchen of her family’s home outside Moscow. All smiles, she pauses to tell a visitor about the ballerinas she saw perform at a recent Christmas show, recites bits of poetry and then scampers off to the living room – littered with toys and children’s books – to play with her younger sister.
It’s hard to believe that hours after Nika’s birth, doctors told her mother, Lyudmila, or Mila, Kirillova, that as a baby with Down's syndrome, Nika would never develop – that in the best-case scenario, she would say “Mama” by age 36. That day, doctors began pressuring Mila and her husband to institutionalize Nika, to leave their baby in a special hospital ward for abandoned children, Mila told Human Rights Watch researcher Andrea Mazzarino.
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