A blog for choice
A friend of mine is a genetic counselor. People go to her for genetic counseling. Sometimes they decide to have testing done on themselves before they get pregnant, but usually they are there to test during a pregnancy. If it looks like there will be problems she makes sure they know about all the supports available to them. Sometimes they decide to terminate the pregnancy.
She had a client several years back who was late in pregnancy (I’m not sure how late) and discovered that her baby had a severe bone abnormality. Ultrasounds showed that it had multiple broken bones. Babies with this condition do not survive vaginal births and do not live long after caesarian births. They require a great deal of morphine to calm them. The client decided to think about things for a while, but she came back for her follow-up appointment a week later. She told my friend that according to her pastor she would go to hell if she had an abortion. This was a late-term abortion and it would definitely be murder. She had been praying and crying about it and she just could not stand the thought of her baby being in pain. She was afraid to move, afraid to sneeze lest she cause another bone to break or the baby to be in more pain than it was. She said that she had decided she would accept the consequences. She wanted to terminate the pregnancy.
She said she knew she was going to go to hell for doing it, but she would go to hell to stop her child’s pain.
Some would have us believe that there are women who use abortion as birth control. That makes as much sense to me as saying someone has decided not to brush their teeth because they can always have a root canal later.
Women have abortions because they learn their babies have terminal conditions, because they got pregnant when they were taking prescription medications which are harmful to the fetus, because they find themselves abandoned and unable to care for themselves or a child, because they have substance abuse problems, because the pregnancy is the result of rape, because they have health conditions that make pregnancy dangerous, because…
As Gawdessness said, "It ain't simple." It never is.
That's a powerful story.
ReplyDeleteA friend of my mother's had a late-term partial-birth abortion. Her baby had no brain. And she would have died in childbirth had she carried the baby to term.
It drives me crazy when I hear politicians say there is "never a medical reason".