Over recent years, I have noticed several cases where people have agreed to, or co-operated with, abortion in response to dire warnings from doctors about a baby who will be born with significant disabilities. The doctors describe these disabilities in the most chilling terms, together with assurances that the baby will not live more than a few hours or days. This has a significant influence on people's attitudes ("What else could we do?") The psychological trauma of being faced with this decision, presented gravely by those who are seen as experts, causes people to repudiate their faith and consider the Church callous and heartless for her opposition to abortion.Over the same period, I have also come across several cases where a mother (often accompanied by a decent and supportive husband or "partner") has stood firm, refused a "termination" and heroically opted to give birth - only to find subsequently that the predictions turned out to be exaggerated or even wholly false.
A story reported last month by Channel 4 (Joy for mother advised to abort) is typical. Doctors predict: baby will only survive for a few hours, will be "profoundly disabled"; condition deteriorating; advise "termination". Mother and father refuse; go through "absolute torture"; baby is born perfectly healthy; nothing wrong after all. The most inspiring line of the story is where mother Becky Weatherall told the Western Mail newspaper that "if he was going to die, she wanted it to be in the arms of his parents."
There are two questions to raise here. The first is to ask just how common this sort of thing is. I would be interested to know whether research has been done on how accurate are these predictions of disability and whether indeed some are made without sufficient evidence.
The second and deeper question is why the very weakest and most vulnerable children are deemed to be the most unworthy of life. Surely in a civilised society, the weakest should be those afforded the greatest protection by the strong? Remind me: why was it that my father's generation fought the second world war?
16 comments:
Dear Father,
I happened upon your wonderful blog after my brother-in-law, Fr. Avram, mentioned it on his blog. Lo and behold, an article on the seek and destroy mission of disabled babies! This is a topic near to my heart as we lost a daughter at two months of age to a heart ailment coupled by Down syndrome. During my pregnancy, we learned that over 90% of Down's children are aborted in the US, where we live. A website ministry that I and other moms started may interest you: www.prenatalpartnersforlife.com. We reach out to women all over the world who have received an adverse prenatal diagnosis to support them in a decision to carry their child to term in the face of a medical culture which gives enormous pressure to abort. Go there to learn more, and please let others know more about us!
Blessings to you,
Elizabeth Brown
"...why was it that my father's generation fought the second world war..."
So the warm-fuzzy draft dodging hippies could rise to power in the 1960's and destroy the Western world with their nonsense!! Makes you feel good, doesn't it?
We have become a sick, self-centered and WIMPY society! We've lost all touch with suffering and we do everything we can to run away from pain and inconvenience. We've been trained to KILL in order to get what we want and it's only getting worse. Now we should kill our aged parents because taking care of them is inconvenient, we should off the crippled and the retarded, we need to murder our unborn babies to avoid any and all suffering and hardship (as if that's all that babies cause us??) and so forth and so on and so on... Is it any wonder that I stay on my farm and hardly ever go out into society?? I don't think I'm superior or less of a sinner...I just can't take the World today. It's a scary place and I can picture myself as a helpless old woman being "put down" like a dog because this wimpy lazy society can't be bothered to take care of me at the end of my life.
My neighbours were told that their unborn daughter's heart was so severely malformed she would be unable to breathe and would die straight after birth. They were advised on several occasions to have a "termination". Mercifully they are a courageous Christian family and refused. J was born with exactly the abnormality predicted, but pink and screaming not blue and limp. It turned out her ability to tolerate the heart condition was much greater than the doctors expected. She had major surgery at 5 months old, more surgery at 9, and is now an active, healthy 13 year old (and my daughter's best friend).
Interestingly, they were filmed at various stages during the pregnancy for one of those fly-on-the-wall TV documentaries. The TV company didn't use the footage, they suspect because they made it clear that the reason they ignored the doctors' advice was because they were Christians.
When my wife and I were expecting our second child we were referred to a consultant ultrasonographer because of the suspicion that there was a problem. He told us the child would be born with something called a prosencephaly, a horrific looking deformity which went on also to cause death. We didn't even consider an abortion but I'm sure many others would have, and would have blindly trusted the consultant. After a couple of months and many more ultrasound scans, the consultant admitted that "maybe he had been looking too hard" for problems, oblivious to the potentially fatal effects his "looking too hard" might have had. Mattia was then born completely normal and will be 6 on Friday. I dread to think how many people are fooled into aborting children that are perfectly well.
This shows up the philistinism that exists in much of British medical practice today.
Doctors will not only distribute such immoral, blinkered advice to couples in such tender predicaments as this, but also to pregnant teenage girls who are most of the time, strongly encouraged to have a termination, viewed as an easy means of getting rid of a little 'blip'.
The debate on euthanasia is another controversial medical debate, but we see how this so-called 'culture of death' is increasingly infecting medical practice today.
The problem I have with doctors and modern medicine, is that they exist to fuel the pill popping (drugs, contraceptives) culture that we live in today, the promotion of an unnatural, mechanised lifestyle funded by the filthy rich drug companies who are determined to have us all using some form of medication before we die. They and the products they issue are not the way to physical or spiritual health. My point? This whole business is based on money NOT ethics.
I myself have heard of a number of instances described by Fr. Tim where healthy babies have very nearly been aborted. We must remember that doctors are not God, and we must follow our faith always.
The answer is "none". There is no significant research being done anywhere in the world about abortion, depite it being, in some countries, the most common of all elective surgeries.
No one wants to shine a light on that bug's nest.
Hello Fr Tim
In one year I had four such cases. One couple told me they had met taking handicapped children to Lourdes and now they felt that God had decided to bless them with one of their own (their first child). It was diagnosed as severely Downs Syndrome. It was born perfectly healthy. Another couple were told that their child would die within hours of birth. They had a priest friend at the hospital to baptise it. He was born perfectly healthy, last year made his first Communion and plays cricket for Dulwich College. I forget the predictions given to the third - also perfectly healthy. The fourth couple had to endure an Anglican chaplain advising them to terminate for the sake of their other children and a nurse claiming to be a Catholic sent in to say something very similar. Finally a young Doctor clinched it by saying 'I don't know how you can be so cruel. That baby is in agony in your womb'. Sadly they terminated - a decision they regretted ever since.
In all cases enormous pressure was brought to bear on the parents. When I wrote about this once in a newsletters other parishioners came forward with similar stories. I now always mention it in pre-marriage classes.
I am 4 months from being a doctor myself, so I have some insight into these situations from a medical point of view.
I clearly do not in any way agree with abortion, or the way doctors advise it, and even pressure parents into it, because they believe the child will be "severely disabled". I think it's disgusting, and goes in direct opposition to the very soul and purpose of a doctor.
However, my thoughts in terms your question:
"The first is to ask just how common this sort of thing is. I would be interested to know whether research has been done on how accurate are these predictions of disability and whether indeed some are made without sufficient evidence".
As with every test in medicine, there is a certain 'false positive' rate associated to the test; that is, sometimes you will get a postive test result when the true result is negative.
However, for the vast majority of tests the false positive rate is far outweighed by the true positive rate.
Otherwise the test wouldn't be in use!
From my knowledge and experience of these sorts of test (amniocentesis, ultrasound etc) I would say that they give an acceptable rate of true vs false positives (and some tests, like amniocentesis are basically 100% accurate).
The doctors are right far more times than they are wrong.
They may be less good at predicting the *degree* of handicap, however.
I would suggest that there is a reporting bias, and we only hear in the media about these 'false positive' cases, while the vast majority of 'true positives' don't get reported
(either because the baby is aborted, or because...well..there is nothing to report because the baby had the condition the doctors predicted based on the tests).
Antonia - I am sure that the tests, properly applied, give a reasonably accurate result with, as you say, some margin of error.
However, I would be concerned to know how often the advice actually given to parents is an accurate reflection of the true "risk" of disability. I raise the question because of my own experience, shared by other priests (cf. Fr Stephen's comment). There's something rotten going on here.
Elizabeth - many thanks. I'll take a look at your site.
One of the arguments in favour of the abolition of capital punishment was the suggestion that sometimes mistakes occurred, juries brought in "guilty" verdicts, and people were hanged who were in fact not guilty.
The parallel is, admittedly, not exact, but I wonder why the same argument doesn't apply to misdiagnoses resulting in the abortion of healthy children.
I am certain that your suspicions are probably true; the obstetricians are likely to err on the side of "caution" and focus more strongly on the potential risk of a prenatal anomaly, as opposed to the potential of the test being incorrect.
Also, from their point of view, if an abortion is going to happen (which it will in the majority of cases), then medically it is better for it to happen sooner rather than later in a pregnancy, so women are encouraged to do it 'now', if they're going to do it.
Additionally, as I said before, in the majority of cases the ultrasound findings *will* be correct (and other tests, as I said like amnio, are basically undisputable), and so the doctors do rely quite heavily on the findings.
However, prenatal ultrasound does have a higher false positive rate that do other tests (possibly even up to 20% FP rate for certain things). So if you consider that, and the fact that more and more women are having more and more ultrasounds, then of course the absolute numbers of 'false positives' will go up, as the number of scans go up.
However, tragically medicine & society view congenital mental and phsyical handicaps as a disease to be treated...and, God have mercy, this 'treatment' includes ending their life before birth.
Elizabeth's website is wonderful- a true example of God's grace love and mercy reaching down into the dark places of our fallen human nature, and giving us hope.
There were no resources of this kind 22 years ago when the first of my family was expected and my refusal of a pre-natal test for spina bifida was met with the comment 'what? You don't want to know if its got two heads or something?'
Sadly this sort of unthinking negativity is all too common in ante-natal care and symptomatic of the eugenicism that has infiltrated the medical establishment.It is a large part of the Culture of Death which J.P.11 spoke about.
Over the years God has blessed us with nine children, one of whom died before birth, and three of whom have severe disabilities.We have never doubted, before birth or after, that they are God's gift to us, a blessing on our marriage, a sign of His great love for us and our true vocation.
P.S.
I just wanted to add this beautiful prayer which was given to me by a priest:
A Prayer for Special Children
'O Lord, my heart is not proud
or haughty my eyes.
I have not gone after things too great
nor marvels beyond me
Truly I have set my soul
in silence and peace,
a weaned child on its mother's breast,
even so is my soul.psalm131:1-2
I thank you God for my existence
and the opportunity to be Your instrument on this earth.
I thank You for the loved ones who surround me in my family,
and all those people who help with the daily task of looking after me.
I thank you God for the hidden ways
by which You express on my behalf
my thanks to them
and help to show my love and affection.
I thank You for the joy of my being
through which I do Your Holy Will.
The beautiful purpose of my life
will be unfolded among the saints in Heaven
where with my Mother of Perpetual Help,
I will praise you,Most Holy Trinity,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit for ever, Amen
"two heads" - I have often used this as a caricature of this kind of scare tactic. Amazing to hear that it was actually used!
Many thanks for that prayer.
Antonia, I will defer to your specialist knowledge on this one, but I understand that the main problem with amniocentesis is its high incidence of miscarriage, which is around 1% of all procedures. I also understand that the proportion of amniocentesis tests that are positive for Down's Syndrome are around 0.2-0.3%. (I realise that amniocentesis can test for other genetic conditions too).
So although the false positive rate may be close to zero percent, the failure rate is effectively 400% with respect to killing the patient. I don't know of any other diagnostic procedure where such a high ratio of lethality to diagnosis is tolerated.
Congratulations on your impending qualification and good luck!
My wife had an ultrasound the other day and i was half hoping we would get a two headed baby, like the so-called 'two headed girl' in the US, or the two headed archer said to have served in the Ottoman army and, until recent understanding of the siamese twin phenomenon, thought to have been a fiction. The scan showed just the one head, but seeing the beating heart was a relief!
My wife bought a book about pregnancy when we found out she was expecting. The section on screenings says that modern developments in prenatal tests has reduced the incidence of children born with Downs' Syndrome. How does testing for something reduce it's incidence? They daren't spell out what you are only meant to read between the lines.
I was only vaguely aware of amniocentesis from something i saw on the telly as something that was done to help determine whether or not a baby should be exterminated. I came across that 1% chance of miscarriage statistic and couldn't believe they call that 'low'! Took me a while to work out the maths of that 400% failure rate - it is staggering the lengths gone to to kill our spazzed brothers and sisters. Good job its just like bitin' yer nails or gettin' a haircut, innit?
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