GROWTH RETARDING THERAPY?WTF IS THAT?

Parents of a severely cognitively and physically disabled girl have publicly defended their decision to retard her growth through the use of hormonal therapy and surgery, saying they were acting out of love and compassion. This is the opening of an article at Medpage Today
I first saw this story at CNN yesterday, a condensed version that descibed procedures to remove her reproductive organs, breast "buds" (what the hell are those???) and massive hormone therapy all designed to keep her at her current managable size for the remainder of her life. She is profoundly retarded, in effect an infant at 9 years old. This will never, ever change. And the parents contend they opted for this so they could continue to provide thier "pillow angel's" "quality of life" for a longer period of time as opposed to allowing her to mature and "experience the pain and confusion of menstruation" and have lumps on her chest that would frighten and confuse her...or something to that effect.
OK...I have a real problem with this. Having worked with the profoundly retarded in my youth at a not so little tard warehouse called Travis State School, I have seen the "quality" of life broccoli-humans like the pillow angel experience...22 hours a day in a bed (gurney) , 2 hours in a wheelchair out on the porch, someone feeds you mush three times a day, and intermittantly wipes that mush off your undercarriage and gives you a clean nappy after checking for the bedsores that can lead to infection and pain and death. In fact, my own father spent the last 9 years of his life enduring the same routine over and over and over again, until he finally died from th' newmoanee. It is important to point out that Dad was not retarded at birth, a stroke kicked his ass, hard. Any hoo...back to the pillow angel.
These people have radically altered her natural progression in life, being you are born, you live and grow, and then, at some point you snuff it.
Her parents clearly , a: love her dearly, b: don't want to deal with the period thing,ever, c: can't lift anything over 65 lbs (or don't want to), d: wish they had sunk her in the river in a burlap bag with a cinder block like an unwanted litter of kittens when they found out she was so much produce saddling them for life. I suspect it's a little bit of all of these feelings. I don't judge them at all, but I question their judgement. I applaude them for keeping a "special needs" child in the home, but have serious reservations about how they are medically making it convenient to do so. As well as the doctors willing to do it for them. According to the article, much thought and discussion was put into deciding the pillow angels fate, but did she have a say? Of course not, she's profoundly retarded...and while I'm thinking about it what kind of fucked up oxymoron is that???
This is a tough one to call folks...if I ever had a tard baby, I would probably sell him or her to the carnival or for medical experiments (just kidding)...I don't know what I'd do, unless it had down's syndrome and was a boy, if that were the case I'd groom him for the broadway revival and feature length movie of that TV show Life goes on and make a shitload of cash doing it ( still kidding...well maybe ).
This family has my empathy, first for having a child that I'm sure they thought would have 10 fingers and toes, only to find out they had a burden for life that they love. And secondly for the media shit storm that's brewing around thier attempts to do the right thing.
Man.