I recently was consulted by a woman who had a partial-birth abortion, and had complications. It was her first child, she had an ultrasound, and the radiologist told her that the baby was deformed, and suggested that she have amniocentesis. The results were that the baby had a very rare genetic defect. Everyone's heard of Down's syndrome, some people have heard of Turner's sydrome, or some other of the rarer ones, but there are so many genetic defects that there is a large book the size of a large Webster's dictionary, which just lists genetic defects and has photos of some of them. She had one of the really, really rare ones, with all kinds of deformities. Nothing simple like spina bifida or Down's. Anyway, at that point she was given the choice of carrying the baby to term and letting it die, or having an abortion.
In her case, she could have carried the baby to term, it wouldn't have killed her, but the baby wouldn't have lived anyway.
Some women, and I agree that this is very rare, suffer life-threatening complications like abruptio placenta, or eclampsia, or suffer diseases during pregnancy which may be fatal, such as cancer. If a woman takes cancer chemotherapy during pregnancy, it's going to kill the baby, or deform it really badly. Or a woman may suffer acute renal failure, or hepatic failure. There are legitimate reasons to deliver the baby pre-term, because otherwise the mother will die. If the baby is delivered too early, it's not going to live.
These are medical issues, not political issues. |
