Good luck in your treatment! And thanks for sharing your personal experience.screwtape wrote:Sorry to snip out your second cent's worth of wisdom, but clarity demanded it. Your first cent is entirely correct, but incomplete. No abortion needs to be justified to others, but one must be able to justify to oneself for the sake of one's future mental health. As you might have gathered, I have performed and enabled many terminations in my career. I always say to the woman (sorry, HJ, but that social construct seems to break down when it comes to actually being pregnant) that you don't need to give any reason, you don't need to convince me, but you have to be able to be comfortable with your decision down the road. Even if, in the future, you might regret this, you must be able to say to yourself that you did what you thought was right at the time. As long as you feel you can say that to yourself, that is all you need to do in terms of agonising.Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
My 2 cents:
1¢ -- You already don't need a specific reason to have an abortion, so arguing whether a particular reason is 'valid' is moot;
It annoys me greatly to see people making black and white statements about terminations of Downs' Syndrome etc. There's a reason why we do maternal serum testing/amniocentesis. It's not automatically wrong to deny a fetus with Downs' Syndrome a chance to enjoy life; at least it is no more wrong to do that than it is to terminate a genetically normal pregnancy. Surely none of us would say that it is a woman's right to choose, but she can't choose to terminate for a medical reason related to the fetus? As for the rights and wrongs of that decision, I don't think any of us have the authority to impose our choices on others. For the sake of background, I rather disliked my wife's choice of sub-specialisation in the UK, where she did a psychiatry residency aimed towards the UK-recognised sub-specialty of mental handicap, and that reflects badly on me. When we moved to Canada she discovered that mental handicap was not a medical problem here, but was taken care of by social services. She then sub-specialised in child psychiatry and narrowed her expertise down to neurodevelopmental disorders. (Did I mention yet how smart she is?) Now why tell you this? - we had a child who quickly declared himself to be autistic. It was a nightmare at first and I had to radically re-think my assumptions. He was pretty demanding at first (throwing his turds around the house, calls to the school where he was throwing chairs at teachers - rather embarrassing when you are a rural physician and you can see in the teachers' eyes that they know you are a dreadful parent who has spoiled this child), but thanks to my wife we embarked on a continuous rolling program of behavioural modification. It was exhausting to insist on taking two hours to finish a two minute timeout, but eventually he got it. He now lives in Toronto and is doing postgrad physics. I have mixed feelings when I consider the hypothetical possibility of a prenatal diagnosis for him. As it turns out, I like him exactly as he is (actually I think I love him all the more for his quirks), and I wouldn't change him even if I could. But I can't begin to assume that other people with unusual pregnancies should take the same attitude. It's not my job to judge, it's theirs. I just implement their decision when they make it.
BTW, six month's chemo (FCR) starts in ten days and I'm getting an enforced vacation as I'm told my counts are going to be low enough to preclude trying to work for the next seven - eight months. Oh, joy. Poverty.
I should have phrased it: 'no woman is required to give a reason to have an abortion.' Clearly, parents do have reasons, hopefully not flippant.
I can't help but go back to euthanizing animals, of which I have far more experience than I'd like. Never an easy step, even when the decision is clear-cut. Also, my GF is a patient care advocate at a local hospital, and recently we were discussing end-of-life care & treatments. In both situations, too often the 'patient' is kept alive in great pain & suffering (or, in the case of senile dementia, with no real experience of existence) in service to the emotional needs of the owners/family/juggernaut US healthcare system.
Strawkins cites that 90% of parents choose to abort a DS fetus. I'd be curious to know the thought processes of the 10% who do not. Are they fundamental christians? There are birth defects far more severe than DS. The fundie dogma would dictate that these fetus' also be brought to term, even though their lives would be nasty, brutish, and short. Dawkins' choice of example may have been poor, but his general point, that to bring into the world a child whose life will either be full of pain & suffering, or who will be unable to experience much if anything of life -- and to do from mindless adherence to religious dogma, or some martyr complex -- would be amoral.
NB: My mom was a special ed teacher, and her first job out of college was care-taking (can't call it 'teaching') a group of severely retarded children, including DS. So I'm not completely unfamiliar with the challenges involved.
