Hope or Fear

John Smeaton links to an interesting story at the Daily Telegraph about a mother who was told to abort her unborn daughter as she would not survive birth.

The woman declined: I just said: 'no way.' I didn't want an abortion. I wanted nature to take its course.

The baby survived and has just taken its first steps at the age of nine months.

It seems clear that the woman had no hope of the baby surviving: "We bought a moulding kit to make prints of her hands and feet. We also got two identical blankets - one to wrap her in when she was born that we would keep and the other to bury her in.

It was heartbreaking having to tell the children. They were so quiet.

Every day we wondered if today would be the day she died inside me."

We do not know the future; the medics who thought they did - and who put this woman through the trauma of having to go against their advice and refuse an abortion, then live with the false certainty that her baby would die before or at birth - should be ashamed of themselves.

Incidentally, because the baby survived and her condition was properly diagnosed, they were able to check the rest of the family, and found two of them need monitoring. Their lives could well have been jeopardised had the medical advice to abort been followed...

When we allow ourselves to be driven by fear, as these medics were, and as the mother so easily could have been, we risk doing terrible things. It is not for nothing that Hope and Love, along with Faith in a good God, are the most profound values in Christian civilisation.