Mum of baby with Down's syndrome suing government over abortion law

[SharonasCorona]

The mother of a baby with Down's syndrome is suing the government for allowing disabled children to be aborted after 24 weeks of pregnancy.

After 24 weeks a woman can have an abortion if she is at risk of grave physical and mental injury, or there is a severe foetal abnormality, including Down's syndrome.

Maire Lea-Wilson says she was encouraged in hospital to abort her son, who is now 11 months old. She felt the assumption was "that you would want to abort a child with Down's syndrome".

I’m in pro-choice, but I didn’t realise you could abort disabled children until birth. It’s shocking that a woman with a healthy baby with Down’s Syndrome was encouraged to have an abortion, right up until she carried the baby full term.

It depends though on doom and gloom vs realistic prognosis.

For example my cousins pregnancy was given a very pessimistic outcome, but she was able to have a healthy baby at the end. If you ask her I'm sure she would say the drs were fear mongering but what they were doing is giving her the likely scenarios in order of possibility. Her scenario now was a very very unlikely scenario and in my view it would have been unethical to weight it as an equal possibility

I believe the response given should be lead by statistics eg. Average life span, likely hood of severe co-morbidities, likely hood of various levels of functioning.

The difficulty is that people with downs that can hold down jobs etc obviously exist but the stories of those people, the people who are now anti abortion campaigners or who feature in the many many viral videos are fairly common within media etc and tend to be the image people think of. We shouldn't down play their achievements but also we should ignore the adults for whom that isn't a possibility and who have high levels of care needs who's families often feel are "hidden" due to not meeting media images

Sally Phillips for example spoke about feeling that people spoke about heart defects too much, but its difficult to say then well we shouldnt mention the very real possibility and even factual stats because its doom and gloom

@MindGrapes Thanks. I hadn't realised it was a zombie post!

I realy must start checking OP dates again!

And to anyone struggling with similar issues!

I’m not sure most people can be certain how they’d feel, unless/until it happened to them.

I know someone who had always said she could never abort a DS baby - until she was told at a scan that because of her age and something seen on the scan, there was a high likelihood of Down’s.

She had further tests and the baby did not have DS after all. But there was a week of agonising until she heard, when she knew she would have to terminate if it was bad news, since by then she knew from a close acquaintance with a DS child what the day to day realities would mean, and her own circumstances would have made it extremely difficult to provide the necessary care.

I agree with pps about Sally Phillips in that documentary. I do understand her feelings, since she adores her son and can’t imagine having aborted him. But he did seem to be quite high-functioning, which is not always the case by any means, and maybe her circumstances are easier than would be the case for so many people.

This is a ridiculous case and will not be given the go-ahead t proceed imo. From the source given it is not at all clear that this mother was pressurised to abort, merely that her rights were made clear to her immediately. The right not to shackle people or society with severely impaired lives that may be full of pain is hard-won and deserved. It is a delicate issue of course, and the rights of disabled people themselves are equally valid and hard-fought for. Late-term abortion is not something anyone would wish is necessary, but the very few occasions where it may be implemented could be for so many different reasons that to remove it is insane.

Abortions may be performed after 24 weeks in certain circumstances, for example, if the mother's life is at risk or the child would be born severely disabled. Abortions where gestation is 24 weeks or over account for a very small number of abortions (0.1% of the total). There were 279 such abortions in 2019.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/891405/abortion-statistics-commentary-2019.pdf