Okay, I was supposed to sign off after the last post but I quickly checked out Trisha’s blog and I had to comment on her post The Gift of a Child about parents choosing to keep or abort their unborn babies with medical problems. As I mentioned to her, when I was pregnant with Bella, Brian and I were sitting in the doc office (not our regular obgyn) waiting for the same check-the baby-for-deformities ultrasound. There was a little TV playing and on it there were other couples talking about when they took the test. One mom talked about how she found out her baby had medical problems so she chose “termination.” Brian and I were shocked to see it “advertised” in the waiting room.
This time, when I was pregnant with Andrew, I told my obgyn Dr. V that I wanted to skip all that testing. Being a Christian, pro-life doc, he understood that we’d never abort if there was something wrong but he encouraged me to take the non invasive tests so if there was a problem he’d be able to prepare for it before delivery. (I thought about babies that went through surgery before they were even delivered!) So we went for the ultrasound and minimal genetic testing.
When we arrived at the ultrasound office we explained to them that we were only doing this so if there is something wrong, we could prepare to do whatever was medically necessary to help our baby. Termination was a word never to be uttered before us. The genetics testing lady clucked her tongue a bit but she complied. It’s crazy that we had to be so adamant and fight for our baby’s life before he was even born!
Ugh, that fired me up! Hand me the vacuum. I’ve got some serious cleaning to do…