DUIN: Ideally, choice is informed

Several years ago, I attended a meeting of single women who were getting pregnant through in-vitro fertilization.

I was taken aback when one - who had wanted a child for years - announced she would abort her son if he had Down syndrome.

I asked the group’s national chapter if I could write about keeping a Down child.

“If you were the single mother of a child with Down syndrome and wanted to tell your story, I might consider it,” went the reply, “but it sounds to me like you just want to publish an anti-choice article for an issue that is a personal choice.

“It is hard enough to make such a decision, and I’m sure that the women of our group know about all of their choices.”

No, they don’t.

I have heard stories from female friends with problem pregnancies whose “genetic counselors” pressure them to abort. Did Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, whose infant son has Down syndrome, get similar advice?

Sometimes the diagnosis is wrong.

An April 21, 2002, Akron Beacon Journal story tells of a Canton, Ohio, couple who filed a $3.5 million lawsuit claiming a doctor negligently aborted their living child at 12 weeks.

The doctor, who told the couple the child had died in the womb, had misread an ultrasound. A pathologist found the child was viable with no genetic defects.

I interviewed Dr. John Elliott, the director of maternal-fetal medicine at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix, who specializes in helping mothers of triplets, quadruplets or more carry their babies to term.

“What terrifies patients is they are told their child will be ‘handicapped,’” he said. “What pops into their mind is total brain damage. But it might only be visual acuity, which means the kid will have glasses. Or they have a bit of hearing problem.

“When the woman is terrorized at the beginning, she is not told what those handicaps are.”

So these children sometimes are treated as monsters. An April 20, 2006, story in the Arlington Catholic Herald records one doctor telling the mother of a girl with Trisomy-13 she would not want to look at nor hold the girl after her birth. Plus, if she were born alive and began to choke, she would not resuscitate her.

The child died in the womb at 34 weeks, and the newspaper carried a photo of her mother cradling the stillborn baby.

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