Did you see the article about babies photographed in the womb from 12 weeks?

[lisalisa]

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Highlander - just curious as to what support you envisage in your last sentence?

I don't think that it was what you were refering to, but I do find it odd that adoption is no longer considered to be a viable option for an unwanted pregnancy. Odd in the sense that I can understand a woman wanting to "get rid" ot the problem as easily and privately as possible, yet adoption still remains more common in the US say. Without doubt the pro-life lobby is partly responsible for this, and I don't condone the actions to which they sometimes stoop. Yet I don't believe that there are all these adopted children out there who would prefer to have been terminated...

My friend's son was born at 25 weeks. Spent the first year in hospital- now age 5 is fine. Apart fomr one dodgy eye. He's just finishing his first year at school - no problems at all. Definitely no profound developmental problems.

I agree with a lot of what Rhubarb has written. I do know people who have ahd abortions (mainly becuase the time wasn't right) and not regretted it at all- but these were all early abortions.

If a woman has a scan/amnio etc which shows a problem at that stage (well preferably before the results actually) she needs counselling to make the right decision for her- not an assumption that an abortion will follow. I have friends who have had to battle to keep their children with DS- following amnio results and that's not right. I also have friends who have hugely regretted their abortions, in some cases from before they went through with them iyswim.

India Knight wrote a very thought provocking peace on this recently in the Sunday Tmes following the birth of her daughter. Unfortunately I can't find it. Basically the gist was that if she had known of her dd's condition before having her then she would have been offered a termination and may have taken it- but now seeing her as a newborn she couldn't believe she would have done that.

The reason I think that women need counselling before undergoing late terminations even for disability is that a lot (not all) of the conditions have very variable outcomes. if you undergo a traumatic termination only to meet a success story a few years later -with the same condition as your child had- then you need to be emotionally prepared to deal with that. It doesn't mean that I think that termination (even late) is wrong for disability at all- just that I think it is incredibly important that the woman knows all the possible outcomes- not just the worst case scenario. For something like anencephaly- there is only a worst case scenario- but this is not true of other condiitons. Without knowing the whole range of possibilities how can she make an informed decision that she will have to live with fr the rest of her life. Im assuming that late terminations are not easily forgotton.

Here is the text of the India Knight article:

Sunday's newspaper

April 25, 2004
Thank God I let my baby live
If India Knight had known the truth about her baby?s medical condition, would she have had an abortion, she asks herself

Unfortunately, I am not particularly pro-choice. Abortion is a subject I normally button my lip about: saying that you are pro-life is considered illiberal and anti-feminist. So I keep quiet about the fact that I believe with all my heart (and what passes for my brain) that life starts at the moment of conception.

This seems to me to be simple biological truth. A dead baby is a dead baby, whether it is a six-week or 20-week-old ?foetus?. I understand and accept that this may be a minority view, though nothing will persuade me to believe that the majority of people feel it is in any way right to kill, as is currently legal, a 24-week-old unborn baby ? one that sucks its thumb, kicks its legs, smiles to itself, hiccups.

I feel so strongly and categorically about the subject that piping up only leads to the more unpleasant kind of arguments. Religious persuasion is usually invoked (I am a semi-lapsed Catholic who uses contraception, but I would be pro-life, I think, regardless of faith or the lack of it). However, after Channel 4?s My Foetus programme last week, which showed a doctor performing a vacuum-pump termination, I want to say my piece.

Eleven weeks ago I gave birth to a lovely little daughter. On Wednesday morning she will be having open-heart surgery to correct a congenital condition called truncus arteriosus, aka common arterial trunk: her pulmonary artery and aorta are conjoined. Being told, as we were when Nell was one day old, that your baby has a serious and life-threatening heart defect is an experience so brutally devastating that I cannot describe it.

Nell has common arterial trunk because of a chromosomal malfunction called 22q deletion ? bits of genetic material have fallen off the 22nd chromosome. She could, in theory, be pretty badly handicapped: there are a possible 180 symptoms of the syndrome, including heart defects. So far, thank God, our beautiful girl has shown no sign of any of the really serious ones, aside from her heart condition ? but since she?s only tiny, that doesn?t mean we?re out of the woods by any stretch.

I am 38, and as a 38-year-old I was scanned repeatedly throughout my pregnancy. Everything was, as my obstetrician put it, ?boringly normal?. Nell?s heart has four chambers and fully functioning valves ? that?s all the scan can see. I had a nuchal fold test to determine the baby?s chances of having Down?s syndrome: it came back as a one in 1,600 chance. Pretty remote, so I didn?t have an amniocentesis ? it seemed pointlessly invasive, given that I would not abort a child if it had Down?s. If I had had the test, though, it would have picked up the chromosomal abnormality ? and since this is often indicative of heart defects, my boyfriend and I would perhaps have known about this too.

Imagine thinking you are carrying a healthy baby and being told that, actually, she may have 180 diverse handicaps and a life-threatening heart condition. What would you do? I like to think that I would have brushed off any suggestion of a termination. But I don?t know: it is possible that I would have performed a quick ideological U-turn and yelled, or sobbed, for the abortionist. Mercifully, this was never an option: we didn?t know anything was wrong.

The only point at which I waver in my unwavering stance on abortion is in the case of babies born so severely handicapped that, we imagine, their life will barely be ?worth living?. Since having Nell, and joining e-mail groups and discussion boards, I have changed the greater part of my mind: what my boyfriend and I are going through is a picnic compared with what some families must endure. And their children are happy ? I?ve looked at their photographs and seen them wearing party hats on their birthdays, or playing in the garden, beaming with joy. A beam of joy is a beam of joy, no matter how sick you are. Some of these children have severe learning difficulties, some have serious physical anomalies; one or two are so ill that it hurts your heart to look at them.

But they all have one thing in common: they are alive, and enjoying their lives and, above all, they are all loved.

Who are we to say what does or does not constitute a life ?worth living?? Should all these children have been sucked out and ended up in some hospital bin? And what do you do if your perfect child is horribly burnt or is involved in a hideous car crash when she is 10 years old? Do you quietly dig a hole in the garden because, suddenly, her life is no longer ?worth living? either? When I was in my late teens and early twenties and militantly pro-choice about a woman?s ?right to choose?, having an abortion was in some quarters seen as a badge of, if not quite honour, then a commendable, almost sexy kind of feminist bad girlhood.

As a reasonably bad girl myself, I remember feeling left out ? how puerile that seems now ? because I managed to have sex and not get pregnant. My friends referred to their terminations as ?abos?, thought of themselves as rather rock?n?roll, and liked airing the old chestnut that terminating their baby?s life was as easy as having a tooth out.

It has been my unhappy experience to escort two women to an abortion clinic in London, friendship being stronger than moral conviction. One fainted straight afterwards; the other cried before, during and after, and every day for the next six months.

I?ll never forget seeing the other half-dozen women in the waiting room waiting to go upstairs and have their baby removed and thrown away. In both my friends? cases, the abortion was chosen because, well, you know, having a baby wasn?t terribly convenient at the time.

My daughter is the most wonderful thing to have happened to my boyfriend and me. She has fat little cheeks and huge blue eyes and tufts of black hair, and every time she smiles her gummy smile I am so overwhelmed that I just stand there grinning back and want to explode with love. It breaks my heart to think that there are people who abort children like her, and it breaks my heart to think that I may once have been one of them.

There is no point in sitting on the fence on this subject. Like everybody, I try to see that morality is personal, that everything is a matter of choice. But if you believe something is wrong for you and wrong in general then you might as well call what you hold true a moral principle.

Tony Blair once told the late Cardinal Winning that though he was personally opposed to abortion, he didn?t want to impose that view on others. Winning couldn?t believe his ears. ?On what other policies do you apply such a logic?? he asked. Winning thought Blair?s fence-sitting was shallow, and we might all be guilty of such fence-sitting when forced to address this most emotional of subjects.

But let me just tell you: our baby smiles at us and the sun comes out. She could have ended up as bits of human tissue in a bowl of water, like the baby terminated in My Foetus.

You might take the view that the thing in the bowl is merely a collection of cells ? but surely every intelligent person knows in their heart that this is ethical flimflam. Do what you will with your pregnancy ? I am not calling for the criminalisation of abortion ? but have the moral courage to clearly understand what it is that you are doing.

I have spent my life listening to women voicing their right to choose, and I?ve supported them often in that choice. But I want to call for another right: the right to name the thing lying in the bowl. It is the same thing as the one lying downstairs in a cot. It is a baby.

Agree with Highlander; if pro-lifers were genuinely concerned about women and babies they'd do something to help those struggling in appalling circumstances, not harass and persecute women at abortion clinics (patients and staff).
Jimjams is right as well that parents who get bad news about fetal development should be told, honestly, about the potential range of disability and any uncertainty. The decision to continue or terminate in late pregnancy must be heart-rending and the very least that these families deserve is full, honest information including an admission that there are some things doctors just don't know.
An aside; I was a 'surprise' pregnancy, conceived when my parents were in their final year at university (my mother says family planning clinics in Methodist Wales wouldn't give unmarried women the pill). I could have been one of those things in a bowl but so what.

... 'so what' ie it's never bothered me at all, if they had aborted me I wouldn't exist to worry about it. Probably not making any sense at all!

eddm - is that just an existentialist point, or do you really feel that your life has had no benefit to others?

Er, eddm, when we use the term pro-lifer, could we distinguish mad loonies bombing abortion clinics from people who genuinely believe that human life begins at conception and can't agree with abortion for that reason?

I would never condone any kind of harassment or violence against anyone involved in abortion, nor would I criticise anyone for choosing termination themselves. Opposing abortion is not incompatible with supporting women who choose to have children under difficult circumstances -- I am involved with two organisations which do just that.

I have seen a close family member carry to term a baby with a fatal genetic condition. The baby died aged 6 weeks, and while it was a very sad and difficult time for all the family, it was also a privilege and a joy to be able to have that brief time with him.

In the light of that family background my own decision not to have any ante-natal screening tests was constantly challenged and criticised by doctors. I agree with Jimjams and Rhubarb that there is an overwhelming assumption behind the current ante-natal testing regime that termination is the only acceptable outcome, and that women may be pressured or panicked into making decisions about termination when that may not be the only option.

There is a profound lack of a coherent philosophical and ethical background to the testing regime in UK antenatal care; I don't say this to mean that women should be discouraged from having terminations, but rather there is a need for open and honest discussion of the implications of carrying out these tests.

Well said Eddm. I don't like the anti abortionists hijacking the expression 'pro-life' (what else would anyone be? Anti-life?) and I think they've won in a small way when this expression becomes accepted and acceptable shorthand for 'anti abortion.'

Thanks for saying that frogs. I know that in some circles it is deeply 'uncool' to admit that you beleive that life begins at conception, as I do.
I hate the fact that terms such as 'pro-life' are attached to the loony minority when the majority of people who hold these views will have no truck with what the loonies beleive or advocate, and are horrified at how they behave.

I am pro-choice, because history tells us that when that choice is not made available then women suffer. Women have always made a choice between their foetus and their own self-interest. In societies where safe abortions are not available then infanticide is more common eg in tribal societies, where the number of children vs the availability of resources can mean the difference between life and death for the mother. However nature has lots of "tricks" to make you try to preserve the life of your child, starting from when you're pregnant. I's not surprising that we suddenly find a newborn the most important thing in our life and can't imagine doing it any harm - but I tend to think that that's actually hormones, not any innate "value of life" attached to the foetus. Put it this way - we have evolved to love our children but not necessarily every foetus.

I also think eddm has a point - I don't believe in Owen Meany type parables where every life is sacred and meaningful, the value we get out of our life is for us and our closest and dearest, and if we weren't there then in all probability life for most people wouldn't be much different. But I'm aware this isn't how most people think about themselves! That doesn't mean I don't love my DS very much and would regret it if he didn't exist - but I see that very much as something personal to me, and it doesn't give me the right to impose choices on other people who face different circumstances.

But if we don't value life then aren't we in the difficult waters where we end up justifying all sort of atrocities?

Personnally I'm not sure that I can fully comprehend why terminating a 39 week old "foetus" is legal whilst terminating the life of a one-day old "baby" is murder. Why does the mother have a completely different set of "rights" once the baby is born?

And, from a more tongue in cheek perspective, if life has no value other than possible some personal value to a few, then why do we pay taxes to support many who have no personal value to ourselves as individuals?

But this would be so very off topic!

I don't have any problems with such photos being shown and women being reminded of the implications of their choices. Yes women should have choices, but please let us make educated ones. An abortion is not the same as getting rid of a cyst or a tumour.

But the point is in some societies, mothers do have the right to decide whether their one-day old child lives. That doesn't mean in those societies murder is necessarily condoned - it's a question of when society decides that child has a right to exist that "stands alone" from that of the parent. For some societies, that's a long way down the tracks. Now actually we do tend to treat women who commit infanticide with a great deal more care and with greater leniency than someone who, say, murders a teenager or an adult - so even our society preserves to some degree that distinction. But I see this as a matter in the end for society to decide - not an absolute moral distinction (as perhaps those of you who are more anti-abortion would do).

As for why we have social security, I see that very much as a safety net which makes all of us better off in the end because eg it reduces conflict, improves job allocation, improves risksharing and therefore improves overall welfare. There are good social and economic reasons for altruism, which makes everyone better off. Similarly, murder is generally taboo in most societies because the alternative (everyone having armed guards) is pretty costly and inefficient. That's different from saying that a child's life is sacred from conception - because actually it doesn't make that much difference to me if, eg poor eddm hadn't made it (apart from the joy of having eddm on mumsnet of course).

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Thanks Florence . Ladymuck, no, I do think my life has some meaning (particularly for my friends and family obviously) but I'm not bothered by 'what if I hadn't existed' ? frankly I'm sure the rest of humanity would have coped. And the odds against any individual existing in the first place are pretty huge, starting with the Big Bang, this planet being able to support life, evolution into human beings blah blah blah. I don't understand or agree with the people who say that 'my mother might have aborted me and that's terrible' and use it as an anti-abortion argument. Often associated with the debate about termination for disability. I happen to have a medical condition which in some cases is a lot more severe or an indication of other serious problems so may be a reason for some women to terminate pregnancy. The fact that a foetus with the same medical condition as me might be aborted doesn't affect me either.

The only thing that does get me going is abortion because women are devalued in some societies and cultures, eg China. That does offend me.

Florenceuk,
Which societies condone infanticide currently?

Now for that I'd have to go and look at my book - rest assured though there are some around in the world!

BTW are you all vegetarians? Let's not be too specie-ist about this. After all cows and lambs and sheep can blink and breathe and if they had thumbs, probably suck 'em. And unlike a 12-wk foetus they can exist outside the womb....

I think we're all aware of just how a bay develops in the womb, just that these new pictures brought it home a bit. As I've said before, I am pro-choice and would never want to see abortion mande ilegal. Women MUST have the choice. However, the time limit needs to be lowered.

I disagree with India Kinight, a 6 week old feotus is NOT the same as a new born baby.

Florenceuk - according to this BBC report, in this instance women do not have any choice whether their newborn child lives. It's her husband and the rest of the family who decide. I would imagine that's pretty much the same for most of the tribal societies you are talking about - they tend to be patriarchal not matriarchal.

South Asia - Infanticide story

I must do some work. But a good book to read is Srah(?) Hardy, Mother Nature.

And Lisalisa I disagree. Society hasn't defined it as murder, and I don't think it is either.

Actually it's Sarah Hrdy. Re infanticide, we're generally talking about hunter-gatherer societies. This is an interesting article (actually posted on anti-abortion site!): pinker

And this one talks about Hrdy's book: hrdy

I agree with lisalisa too. The India KNight article is spot on - who exactly has the right to dictate where the line separating 'acceptable quality of life' and 'unacceptable quality of life' should lie? her example about digging a grave for a horribly burnt child is hard hitting but relevant, IMO.
I also think, as other posters have said, that it's important not to class all pro lifers as violent law breakers.Those people are a tiny minority thankfully. And as for the 'hijacking of the term pro life' www, from where has it been hijacked exactly? why does that term annoy you? and do you not think that it's the term 'pro-choice' which is far more deceptive? after all, I don't see how the 'choice'or 'rights' of the unborn child have been taken into account when abortion is carried out.

Talking about a foetus's or unborn child's 'choice' is ludicrous. A foetus is incapable of making decisions, for heaven's sake. And it's almost as ridiculous to talk about the foetus having rights; it can't possibly have any that outweigh the mother's because it is part of her body. You aren't a human being until you are born.
Do the people who think 'rights' begin at conception date their own existence from conception, or from the day they were born?
PS like the comparison with meat-eating, speaking as a vegetarian. I have a lot of respect for the rights of other sentient beings. Just can't see how on earth you can claim that a foetus has rights apart from those of its mother.

'you aren't a human being until you are born'. I am afraid I cannot agree at all eddm. And why should an unborn child have no rights of any kind? I find this view baffling and frightening.

is a baby in the womb, with a beating heart and identifiable face , fully functioning internal organs etc 'not a human being'?