Alternative to abortion.

This article by Liz Townsend reiterates what I was saying last week about caring for infants with anomalies incompatible with life.

In today’s increasingly high-tech medical world, such diagnoses are more and more common. Emotionally vulnerable at such times, parents are easily swayed by the opinions of diagnosticians and physicians.

Sometimes overtly but more often subtly, the message is sent that everyone – – the family and the baby – – is “better off” if the child is aborted. After all, the child is going to “die anyway,” parents are told.

Perinatal hospices are a direct response to modern medical technology. Amniocentesis and other tests provide more diagnoses of severe genetic anomalies before birth but without the means to cure or treat them. These conditions, such as anencephaly and Trisomy 13 and 18, often make it impossible for the babies to live more than a short time after birth.

Physicians who encourage parents to abort these babies often think it is the “easy” way out. “Doctors are so uncomfortable in these situations, they don’t know what to do,” said Dr. Byron Calhoun, program director of maternal-fetal medicine at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Washington, which has had a perinatal hospice since 1995. “They think there’s no risk with abortion, that the problem will be over.”

Equally important, physicians are convinced they are “helping” the parents if they “save” them the grief of carrying a baby doomed to die. “But every parent in our program has thanked us for the time they had with their baby, no matter how short or long it was,” Dr. Calhoun said.

Lewis’s experience has also shown that carrying the baby to term helps parents deal with the grief that is inevitable when a child dies. “If they abort the baby, the parents will always wonder whether the diagnosis was correct – – whether they murdered a healthy child,” she said.

“If it wasn’t for you guys telling me it wouldn’t hurt to carry her, I wouldn’t have been lucky enough to have felt her grow and move,” wrote the young mother. “I feel so much better knowing I spent as much time as I could with her and no one took her besides God and He took her when he thought it was time. … I’ll never forget my first daughter, she’s a very special girl.”

The whole article is good and emphasized the need for more perinatal hospice care instead of abortion and pregnancy terminations.

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