When a woman chooses not to abort

Charlotte Allen at the Independent Women’s Forum has an excellent piece up, detailing what happened to one woman who – via a sonorgram – learned that her daughter would be born profoundly disabled, and opted to give birth to and love her daughter for as long as she lived.

The whole story is from a feature in the Wapo Magazine and it’s well-worth reading. For all that feminists and others insist that abortion is a “choice,” it seems when a woman carrying a less-than-perfect infant chooses life, even her family and ministers (and doctors) try to talk her out of it.

Because, as we see more and more everyday, this is the era of disposable humanity. Too old, too brain-damaged, lingering-too-long, born with a cleft palate? You might as well die, or better yet, let’ s not even let you take your first breath. Maybe some day you’ll be too fat, or too “unfit” to live.

Undoubtedly, if Sun Hudson’s mother had had prenatal care, she would have gone thru the same thing.

I’m not gainsaying or judging anyone. I’m merely saying that it is perhaps kinder – both for a mother and a child – to allow a severely disabled child to be born, and to allow the mother to hold and love that child for an hour, than to vacuum the child out of her in pieces and have the mother always wondering about that baby she never met. Yes, I did say kinder. Yes, I know that is “backward thinking” and that the Conventional Wisdom is that the “kinder” thing is to abort and pretend the life was never created, never LOVED INTO BEING.

So, I’m backward. I told you I was dyslexic!

This is a very interesting story, well told, and it brings up one of the pressing issues of the age – the whole division of mindsets between the Culture of Life and the Culture of Death, and again, it is striking that the clash between these cultures has become so much to the fore at a time when we are beginning to gauge the impact of John Paul’s pontificate.

And it goes both ways. When a mother chooses to give birth to her child, to allow it to live its short time, she allows love to come into the world, and yes, it forever changes her. And sometimes, a mother will do the other remarkable thing, and she’ll choose her child’s life over her own. It all leaves me awestruck.