Assuming Abortion
June 11, 2009
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Posted by Ray Fowler
Gretchen Naugle shares a troubling story about what happened two years ago when she went for a 4-D ultrasound appointment.
The specialist doctor called me in after the ultrasound to go over the findings. The first words out of his mouth to me were “Well you will have to come in tomorrow for your abortion because of how far along you are.” I was utterly shocked and devastated. All I could do was mutter “What??????” He then proceeded to tell me that my baby had more “markers” for down syndrome and it didn’t look good. I was more shocked that his automatic assumption was that I would abort my baby. I almost couldn’t comprehend what he was telling me in that office. All I wanted to do was run as far away from that man as possible.
Gretchen’s daughter was born several months later with no physical problems.
Categories: Abortion
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The same thing happened to a friend of mine. She also had her baby and her baby was absolutely fine as well. Even had her baby had Down’s syndrome, he would have had a life worth living. They are a wonderful family!
Sharon – I agree. What is troubling about this story is not that a healthy baby might have been aborted due to a misdiagnosis, but that the doctor just assumed that the parents would want to abort a baby with Down’s syndrome. According to recent statistics, as many as 90% of babies diagnosed with Down’s syndrome are aborted in the U.S. today.
This must be fairly common as I also knew someone with such a diagnosis. She did not accept the profferred abortion, and gave birth to a lovely healthy baby, although she and her husband were prepared to welcome a baby with Down’s. I am thankful for the Palins’ very public decision to carry their baby to term and hope it inspires many other parents of would-be Down’s babies.
Bethany – I guess it must be more common than most of us realize. I agree about the Palin family. I also hope their example will help other families to choose life even under difficult circumstances.
I’m a little late finding this blog & thread, but would like to offer the experience of an Robert Murphy, employee of mine in Alabama a few years ago. His wife, a nurse, was told based on amniocentesis that the child she was carrying had spina bifida and would likely not not more than a few hours, or if it survived it would be horribly handicapped. Abortion was recommended, emphatically.
After some soul-searching, they chose not to abort. As Jennifer’s time came to deliver, they expected the worst. When the baby emerged, they found him ABSOLUTELY PERFECT IN EVERY WAY. He is blond, beautiful, all boy, smart and strong as can be, with no hint of spina bifida. Whether he was miraculously healed while in the womb, or the diagnosis had been wrong all along, this couple was stunned at the possibility that they might have destroyed this precious life out of reliance on supposedly “expert” medical advice.
Barry – Thanks for sharing your friend’s experience. It is amazing (and sobering) how often this seems to happen.
I once saw a very graphic picture of an aborted child, and it in every way looked like a baby, but its skin was burned red, and the look on its face was one of terrible pain and anguish. Strange that ‘fetal tissue’ can experience pain and anguish, but it clearly showed. Since once, many years ago when Roe vs. Wade became a done deal, and I was a stupid young woman, listening to stupid advice, I had an abortion, I kept this picture on the wall, to mourn for the child as its mother never got a chance to, because she never knew how horribly her child had died (I hope) and someone needed to mourn that child.
I never saw the one I killed, but I adopted this one, not as a way of making myself more miserable, though sometimes it did that, but as a way to make real to me the fact of abortion, and what it really was. They told me it was just fetal tissue, no problem, just a quick procedure to remove it. But somehow I knew, even as a non-Christian, because in the parking lot of Planned Parenthood in St. Louis, Missouri, I was hysterical and couldn’t stop crying. I knew.
And that act, over the years, when I could not forgive myself, brought me to the Lord and saved the next child, by the same father who hadn’t wanted the first one, and didn’t want the second one either.
I don’t have a picture of that saline induced abortion baby on my wall any more, because it hurts now even more than it did before. I have grandchildren, and their lives are precious to me, and I just can’t continue to look at that baby that no one but perhaps me mourned the death of. But that is a child of my heart, and so is the one I killed, out of selfishness and stupidity. And for the 55 million babies that joined those two, my heart grieves and breaks. Unborn babies may be called fetal tissue, but they are still babies. And no one will ever convince me that a person should have a ‘right to choose’ to kill their child.