Women’s Stories of Dealing With Fetal Abnormality
“The Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done”
Women’s Stories of Dealing With Fetal Abnormality
Emma Loach was about 20 weeks pregnant when she and her partner learned their unborn child had Down Syndrome. They were immediately sent to a hospital to meet with a consultant.
“He then told us what the prognosis would mean for the child,” Loach wrote in the London Guardian. “Life expectancy of 30 or 40. Never being able to look after himself. Likely to have a serious medical problem all his life. And also what the prognosis would mean for Samuel [the couple’s two year old son]: now a very happy child, he would have a completely different childhood with such an ill sibling. And Elliot [her partner] and I would have a completely different future from the one we’d imagined.”
Following this “counseling,” the couple decided on an abortion the same day. Although Loach had assumed that she would go under general anesthetic and wake up not pregnant anymore, she found that she had to take a pill “then and there” to begin the abortion. After a few days, during which Loach “felt like a murderer waiting to strike her victim,” they returned to the hospital for the delivery. They were able to see and hold their son, but they didn’t name him. They had the body cremated and scattered his ashes over a clump of snowdrops.
Although Loach insists that she has no moral or religious qualms about abortion, she describes feelings of grief, guilt, doubt, hatred of pregnant women, and anger at the rest of the world.
“When I see a child with Down Syndrome, I have a tremendous need to explain myself and apologize a million times over,” she wrote. “Apologize for somehow doubting their right to be in this world.”
Another woman who had an abortion after learning her child had Down Syndrome shared a similar experience with us. “I was 26 weeks pregnant when I found out the baby had Down Syndrome,” she wrote. “The doctor, my family, and a so-called ‘Christian’ counselor thought it would be to my and the baby’s advantage if I had an abortion. . . . The counselor was very pushy and told me that I should have an abortion if I really loved my child.
“The abortion was cruel . . . No one ever told me about all the emotional baggage I would be required to carry around for the rest of my life. It destroyed my life! My marriage suffered tremendously and my sex life went down the tubes. My relationships with others were also affected because I no longer trusted anyone.”
Another woman, Sarah Oh, underwent a similar experience, but with a different outcome. A doctor and mother in Western Australia, Oh and her husband, Steve, chose to carry to term after learning that their child had a fatal chromosomal disorder. The baby, named Jonathan Agape Oh, died at birth on April 13, 1998. In a letter to the West Australian published after Jonathan’s death, the couple wrote:
“Jonathan, which means God has given us a son, did not die in vain. . . . He came to remind us that life is precious, that life is worth respecting, that no matter how people think of others as ugly and useless in their own distorted minds, they are always beautiful to those who look at them through the eyes of love.”
Karen Garver Santorum and her husband, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, also lost their baby son, Gabriel Michael, to a fatal disorder. The problem was corrected with experimental surgery, but an infection in the amniotic sac triggered premature labor. Gabriel died just two hours after his birth on Oct. 11, 1996.
Ironically, Karen Santorum’s pregnancy occurred when Congress was debating the partial birth abortion ban–later vetoed by President Clinton on the eve of the one year anniversary of Gabriel’s birth and death. In Letters to Gabriel, a collection of letters she wrote to her son during and after her pregnancy, she wrote:
“There is another way. We know, because we chose it. It was to deliver you and allow you to die a natural and peaceful death in the arms of your parents. . . . To suggest that there simply are not any [alternatives] is to suffocate our own humanity. It is to compel us to be less than what we are. It is to take what is deep and profound and mysterious about being human and cut it off by means of a merciless ‘procedure.’ There can be no crueler deception than this.”
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Emma Loach’s article, entitled, “The Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done,” was printed in the London Guardian on May 31, 2003, and can be accessed in the archives at www.guardian.co.uk. Letters to Gabriel can be ordered from CCC of America, 1-800-935-2222.
