A mother whose unborn child was diagnosed with spina bifida tells her story of the choice to abort:
I said at that stage, a termination was out of the question. I felt such strong love for this baby already and I wanted to nurture and protect him. … As an adult, I felt a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy — but that was a view forged from rational thought, not personal experience. I never once imagined it was anything I would do. I believed that choosing to keep a baby, whatever its disability, was the mark of a good mother. How fate mocks our lofty ideals.
…
The scan confirmed that our baby would never walk. He would be doubly incontinent and paralysed from the waist down. Water was collecting around his brain, and only time would tell if that would impair him mentally. … I tried to shake away the image I conjured in my head of a little boy, lonely and friendless, robbed of the most basic human functions. The prospect of watching a child I’d love just as much as his sisters suffer in this way made me howl. … It was the thought of our son’s incurable impotence that triggered my husband’s tears. ‘Oh God, what sort of life will he have?’ he asked the doctors.
…
When my older sister, Marie, a nurse who has cared for sick children, told me I should spare us all the suffering and have a termination, I was still shocked. And angry. I felt nobody but me loved this baby. … Yet when I look back now, I am grateful for my sister’s words. They gave me permission, somehow, to consider termination. … And so it was that a week after that first scan, and against my initial instincts, I realised I couldn’t bring this child into the world, knowing the extent to which he would suffer. Andrew and I talked long into the night, and finally agreed that ending the pregnancy was the kindest thing we could do for our son.
Yet if making that choice was hard, the physical ordeal was only just beginning. At 18 weeks pregnant, I was too far gone for a surgical termination and would have to go through a labour and delivery, under the care of midwives at our local hospital. The first step was to take the drug Mifepristone to block progesterone, a hormone vital to pregnancy. I swallowed the pill in a side room on the labour ward — the same room where I’d given birth to our younger daughter two years previously. Over the two days that followed, I fought the urge to put my hands on my stomach when I felt the baby move. Knowing that he was slowly dying inside me was the very definition of hell. After two days, I returned to the same room to take a second drug to induce labour. What followed were the worst 16 hours of my life. They passed in a morphine-induced haze, but there was no dulling what was happening. My baby was being forced into the world long before he could survive in it, and it felt unnatural — completely at odds with my instincts as a mother. My body seemed to be doing all it could to hold onto him, and the labour went on and on. At one point, in the grips of what felt like a panic attack, I became hysterical. Gasping for breath and screaming, I demanded that Andrew tell me why we were doing this and why it was the right thing for our son. He calmly described the kind of life we were trying to spare him from, and that we were loving parents, doing what we felt was best. I demanded to know: ‘If this baby was inside you, not me, would you be on this bed right now, ending his life?’ ‘Yes,’ he assured me. ‘I know how hard it must be, and I wish I could take your place.’
…
There are parents with severely disabled children who, I’m certain, would say we made a mistake — that George’s life would have been fulfilling, and ours all the richer for having him. Part of me believes them, but I know, faced with that decision again, I would make the same painful choice.
While I genuinely feel for the parents who receive such horrible news, I am amazed at how entrenched the thinking has become in our culture that it is better to be dead than to suffer from a disability. Is the best way to care for your disabled child to kill him/her? While no one ever hopes to be disabled or to care for someone who is, surely it is not acceptable to kill such persons. A society that cannot value or care for the weakest among us is a society that has lost an element of its humanity. Given this mother’s testimony, it appears she recognizes that she lost some of her own.
Thinking to Believe 
May 21, 2011 at 11:14 am
I’m saddened to read this, but, I suppose, glad I did. I fear this woman has swallowed one the worst lies our culture has to offer.
I worked with people with severe disabilities. From Spina Bifida, to Spastic Quadripelgic Cerebal Palsy, to MS, to Muscular Distrophy. All these people were students in the university of WI system where I attended. Some were candidates for Master’s degrees. One man could barely speak and only had the physical use of half of his right hand. He was the nicest, most generous person I ever met. He did not see his life as an experiment in suffering. He saw himself as the most blessed man in the world.
In another instance, a good friend of mine with Muscular Distrophy, who was killed by a car accident, had many people come to his funeral. People I didn’t know, but, in the seeing, amazed me. One woman, without arms or legs, with a slightly twisted body, used her shoulder to control her motorized wheelchair.
I knew a woman who couldn’t speak, or control pretty much any of her body except parts of her legs and her neck. She was an art major and had a paintbrust attached to her head and used her neck to make beautiful works of art. Better than I could have ever made with my completely “able” body.
Many times, prognosises given in the womb are not accurate or do not come to pass at the level of severity first feared. For all this woman knows, her son could have been much healthier and more able to survive and have a good life than any doctor, nurse, or whomever, would have dared to guess.
But now she’ll never know.
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May 24, 2011 at 5:02 pm
Great comments Aaron. Absolutely true. Unfortunately, all of us healthy people sit back on the sidelines IMAGINE what it would be like to be like that, and we say to ourselves, “I wouldn’t want to be like that. I would rather die.” Strangely enough, people who are like that do not want to die. They want to live. I’m always amazed at how the suicide rate for severely disabled people is virtually zero. It’s all of us healthy people who are wishing we were dead. Ironic…and sad.
I’ve also heard stories of healthy people who had always said, “If I was ever X, I would rather die,” only to one day find themselves as X, and realized that they still wanted to live. It’s easy to say we would rather die, but when you experience it yourself, or know people who do, and you see the quality of life they have and all they add to the people in their lives, it’s a different story.
I think the sad reality is that people’s decisions in this regard are often being driven by selfish reasons. While they speak of not wanting to put their child through all the pain (and while they mean it), I think a large part of the reason they choose to abort is that they do not want to deal with the financial, social, and personal ramifications of raising a child with disabilities. I can understand such thoughts and feelings, but it doesn’t make it any more moral.
Jason
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May 25, 2011 at 2:49 pm
“I think the sad reality is that people’s decisions in this regard are often being driven by selfish reasons”
Exactly what I meant about her swallowing a lie. Too many people think they are acting mercifully toward another person when in reality, they are merely attempting to make their life easier/better/etc.
And on a side note: I guarantee someone would have adopted her son had he been given the right to be born. They could have avoided all the difficulty you mentioned, and still not have killed their own child.
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June 16, 2011 at 7:45 am
I find it interesting that she made her decision emotionally but deludes herself into thinking that she was being logical:
“…I FELT a woman should have the right to terminate a pregnancy — but that was a view forged from RATIONAL THOUGHT…”
“…we were loving parents, doing what we FELT was best…”
(emphasis mine)
Very sad story.
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