Terminations aren’t always the answer

I WAS heartbroken to read in the news tales of expectant mothers who travelled to England for terminations of their pregnancies. I was particularly struck by t wo cases: a doctor whose baby was diagnosed with a condition where its brain had not developed, and a couple whose baby had been diagnosed with Down’s syndrome and had serious, life-limiting complications.

I was so sad to hear of their journeys away from the care of their families to clinics in Liverpool, their desolate experience of walking around a foreign cit y, waiting for the f irst tablet to take ef fect, and to read of their lonely return home af ter terrible trauma.

I have never had the experience of losing a child, but when my babies were born three months prematurely and we faced the ver y real possibility that they would die, or suffer from severe disability, it was heartbreaking. So, I have real compassion for parents who f ind themselves with their dreams turning into nightmares.

However, I have personal knowledge of parents who found themselves with desperate prognoses for their babies during pregnancy. They chose to stay at home and to continue with their pregnancies.

With the comfort of their families and support from medical professionals, they sur vived the traumatic journey through pregnancy, bir th and the subsequent death of their babies. They cherished ever y moment and would not swap the world for the precious time they had with their babies.

Two of the babies lived for hours and another lived for f ive days. One mother spoke of being able to stroke her baby’s cheek to say hello before, heartbreakingly, saying goodbye before their baby girl slipped away in the lov ing arms of her family.

For the baby who lived longer, there was time at home with brothers and sisters. This seems to me to be a much more gentle, compassionate (and therapeutic) choice of the parents. All the additional pain and trauma associated with abortion was avoidable.

SIOBHAN QUINN Londonderry