June 21, 2013
"We made sure our son was not born only to suffer. He died in a warm and loving place, inside me."
"In having the abortion, we took a risk that my body would expel both fetuses, and that we would lose our daughter too. In fact, I asked if we could postpone the abortion until the third trimester, by which time my daughter would have been almost fully developed; my doctor pointed out that abortions after 24 weeks were illegal. Thankfully, Kaitlyn was born, healthy and beautiful, on March 2, 2011, and we love her to pieces. My little boy partially dissolved into me, and I like to think his soul is in his sister."
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In all seriousness, has the NY Times produced a series of articles centering on women who were thankful that they did not make the choice to abort their children?
"Thankfully, Kaitlyn was born, healthy and beautiful, on March 2, 2011, and we love her to pieces."
No, they "loved" their son into little, chopped up, pieces.
"We made sure our son was not born only to suffer. He died in a warm and loving place, inside me."
He died inside his killer.
It's interesting that the NYT and its ilk seem to think that the worst possible thing in the world is to suffer.
Soon we'll all be put out to pasture on Soma when it looks like life might be hard.
What a brave new world!
The bloodthirsty commenters at the NYT live for articles like these. They look for any excuse to kll babies for personal reasons. And their idea of "moral inside" vs. "immoral outside" led them down the path of partial birth abortion.
Of course there are always going to be these special cases. The law can handle that.
No one has the right to decide whether another person's life is worth living.
Pretty rationaliztion, though. Points for getting to sleep at night.
We are all born to suffer. But none of us, no matter how sick, is born *only* to suffer.
Gag. Wretch.
What a pitiful, deluded, evil woman.
Whatever helps you sleep at night, lady.
Captain Obvious asks if the baby girl is considered a human life worth protecting, why wasn't the baby boy? What was so magical about this woman's pubic arch that it endowed the girl with humanity?
And it was feminists who said that if men became pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Ya see what a bunch of insensitive benighted neanderthals pro-lifers are for even questioning the sanctity of abortion? Ya see? YA SEE?!
Tough call, but, if he could have been saved, whether his life would have been "difficult" really isn't the issue.
Witness Stephen Hawking.
I don't know how I would have reacted in such a situation, but the Lefty treacle of, "My little boy partially dissolved into me, and I like to think his soul is in his sister.", makes it sound as if she's trying to convince herself, rather than anyone else.
YMMV
PS Truth in advertising: The Blonde's son had some of the same problems this woman envisioned. She can't go near an OB or pediatric ward because of "The thought of hearing him gasp for air and linger in pain" was her life for 6 months and has turned down good jobs because of it.
I can empathize with this woman, but, as I say, is this piece to convince us of how swell abortion can be or herself?
"The surgeon said our boy had a hole in his diaphragm. Only one lung chamber had formed, and it was only 20 percent complete. If our boy survived birth, he would be on oxygen and other life supports for a long time."
Faced with that set of facts, I would have done the same thing.
Of course, this being the New York Times, I'm suspicious of the "facts".
If I hadn't been hearing variations of this rationalization for the last forty years, I might be tempted to understanding, but its not happening. They must have a full stash of these stories ready to go each time threat emerges or is imagined.
Basic emotional manipulation, almost as if they can't come up with a good reason to allow unfettered abortion in America.
I don't know. This sounds pretty reasonable to me. It sounds as if the child had a serious defect and what live a short painful life.
In my life I've been responsible for making hard decisions. I allowed my mother to be given morphine to ease her pain knowing it would kill her. I've had to decide when to put pets down.
@Bill
First, a baby is not a pet. Second, of the situation with your mother went the way you claim, someone (you, the doctor, or the attending nurse) committed the moral equivalent of murder. The morphine didn't kill her, the person who gave it to her did.
It's no less evil for a woman to deprive her child of life and liberty than it is for the government to deprive its citizens of the same natural rights.
In other words, "pro-life" people aren't always social conservatives.
The reason for the abortion was concern for the child's quality of life. Nicastro suggests she would have been willing to abort the boy in the third trimester had it been legal. She then argues that abortion must be legal until the age when a baby is viable outside the womb. That's a contradiction. The plain truth is that she's arguing for abortion as a means to euthanasia, which she supports regardless of fetal viability.
If only all decisions were black or white.
Eeyore, my reading was that she wanted to delay the abortion so that if the abortion caused births of both babies (one of the risks), then the daughter twin would have had a better chance of survival.
"It's no less evil for a woman to deprive her child of life and liberty than it is for the government to deprive its citizens of the same natural rights."
Yes, but it is also appropriate to think of her — as you are doing here — as the sovereign over the territory of her own body. She ruled ≈ she had the "right to choose."
Yes, but it is also appropriate to think of her — as you are doing here — as the sovereign over the territory of her own body.
She didn't protect her borders and, indeed, invited an invasion. She allowed the immigrants to settle, she naturalized them. Then she executed one. The woman is a rogue state, a fascist dictatorship.
My oldest was diagnosed with heart defects in utero; that story ends with me signing the no-more-life-support order when she was six months old. I don't feel like I killed her, but maybe I'm wrong. Who can say exactly how these things are recorded in the Ledger?
What I do know is: I don't regret the six months. There was more to her than the suffering. I spend a fair amount of time with grieving parents, and this is a constant: there was more to our little ones than the pain. I bet there'd have been more to her boy, too.
What if we developed medical technology in the future that could have saved that boys life or made it easier to live with his condition?
She didn't even give him a chance.
Deirdre Mundy said...:
"It's interesting that the NYT and its ilk seem to think that the worst possible thing in the world is to suffer."
I was thinking the same thing when I read this. I totally agree.
I'm wondering about the twin girl who survived, having completed her in utero life next to a dissolving corpse, whom she had theretofore known as a living partner in that intimate environment. What effect would that have on the young, forming mind? And what is the impact of reading this story now, as it is printed in the NYT? She knows that she lived with her twin's dissolving corpse in the amniotic fluid that was hers, and she knows that her life was risked in order to avoid the pain of a severely disabled baby. She might think, good, because I had my parents to lavish love on me and not to be anguishing over my dying brother. I don't know.
@Brian I'm sad to hear that you lost your child, and I admire you for your respect for the worth of the most disabled.
@Brian
Letting nature take its course is not the same as deliberately causing the death of someone. I don't know if you made the right choice either, but the judgement of what you did is beyond my pay grade.
"...but the judgement (sic) of what you did is beyond my pay grade."
Oh, you're too modest, Chris.
"we love her to pieces."
The boy also.
Don't twins have separate amniotic sacs? So girl twin would not be swimming in the dissolving effluvia of boy twin. Just next door to it.
Now I am all self-conscious, like I have made a spectacle of myself.
Anyway, I found that article moving and horrifying at the same time. My heart breaks for her.
MadisonMan,
I read that too. It still adds up to a post-viability killing. Perhaps she believes post-viability killings are okay only in situations where a pre-viability termination would endanger the life of a twin. One can imagine carving out exceptions. I just don't believe viability is a serious boundary line for her. Her concern is quality of life.
@Brain,
No need to be self-conscious. You gave you opinion based on your own life experience.
More whipped cream on bullshit from the Times.
One plausible argument for one abortion covers a million other shitty reasons and deaths? Got it!
It seems the best way to help this woman would be to make the government force her to bring the child to term and to round up a support group of right thinking people to call her a murderer. I think we should put the Health and Human Services in charge of monitoring pregnant women to make sure they are properly taking care of the child. Kathleen Sebelius is doing such a bang up job of ruining... Err running health care she could do a good job of this. Government always does the best thing.
This would also be the best way to ensure conservatives are a permanent minority, and progressives get to run the government until it inevitably collapses under the pressure of socialism.
But "whatever helps you sleep at night."
Around 2004 the NYT published the story of woman who successfully aborted two of her triplets because, among other reasons, she didn't want to have to shop for things in bulk at CostCo. This is an improvement on that, I'll grant them that.
"Yes, but it is also appropriate to think of her — as you are doing here — as the sovereign over the territory of her own body. She ruled ≈ she had the "right to choose.""
Maybe. But if so, her son was equally the sovereign over the territory of HIS own body.
You know, the one she had chopped up into little bits.
If you're not going to worry about his sovereignty, I don't see why we should care about hers, either.
We desperately wanted this child and would do whatever we could to save him, if his hernia was fixable and he could have a good quality of life.
That "if" is among the most horrifying two letters I've ever seen.
Why not let nature take its course? They could have had a DNR on the child from birth, so they wouldn't necessarily have had to spend months in the NICU. Instead they chose to kill their own "desperately wanted" child. They never got to meet him, or hold him, or appreciate him in any way. Sad.
Life is suffering, thus all humans can be killed at any stage to save them from it.
Just doing you a favor, innit?
I second Joan's comment -- in fact, a DNR-from-birth seems like it would be more appropriate than an abortion that risks the wanted child, even if for no other reason. Did they not consider this possibility? Did the medical staff not give this as an option? Did she think that the active euthanasia of the abortion was not any different and caused her less burden than watching the baby die?
This makes the deletion of old people that much easier.
"Relieve their suffering."
What's the difference?
Oh My God!!! This woman is a monster!
My friends found out at about the 20 week mark that their baby had a hole in her heart and wasn't developing. A couple months later, after regular appointments, ultrasounds, and planning for a dead or seriously handicapped baby, the doctors were baffled to find it had all corrected itself. Baby was born tiny but whole.
What are politicians going to decide after looking at these two stories side by side?
Close friends of mine had a baby born with a malformed heart. They knew it was abnormal in utero, and they grieved when it died a few days after birth.
I don't understand the woman in the NYTimes article.
My daughter had a 'swiss cheese' heart. 8mm of holes at birth, turned blue when she cried,ate, or yelled, the whole shebang. At 3 months old, they all disappeared in the course of a week. The doctor was flummoxed.
You can't predict the course of a child's life from a single screen shot.
This couple was in a tough position that I've never faced. If I had, I think I'd question whether I was entirely trying to spare the child pain, or I was partly trying to spare myself the pain of watching the child suffer.
The out-of-sight, out-of-mind aspect of aborting a baby seems awfully convenient for this woman, who apparently wanted to abort him at nine months. At that age, the only reason she wouldn't have been able to hear him scream in pain from the abortion would be the fact that he hadn't yet taken a breath.
Again, it's a tough row to hoe, raising a severely disabled child for as long as they last, and I never had to face this, so I feel like a shit heel for calling this woman out, but: this was selfish and wrong.
Having seen a nephew and his wife suffer for over a week with a baby born with this condition I think having the baby and loving it through a DNR is the real answer to this. There would never be the guilt that might at some point come to life in this mother. The baby would never actually breath on his own, my nephews never did but they did intubation right away, a mistake in my opinion, as he lingered so long, in limbo, never opened his eyes, never really lived. But he was given the chance.
And my daughter's heart looked NORMAL on the Ultrasound. I have another friend who was told her son had a severe kidney defect and would die at birth.
They sought out prenatal specialists. Another doc looked at the same ultrasound and said "Yeah, he has a weird kidney, and the deformation will likely annoy him once his prostate starts to go.
Pro-choicers don't encounter the 'Dr. was mistaken, ultrasound inaccurate' stories because they destroy the evidence.
I advise the woman's daughter to watch her back.
Mama's countin' your days.
Imagine the trauma as the twin, having your sibling killed right next to you. I mean twins bond within the womb.
Renee, that's impossible. They couldn;t have bonded because the little boy wasn't human because his mother didn't want him!
That's like saying "Babies bond with the placenta in the womb!" You can't bond with a mass of tissue!
I sympathize with parents who know their child will have health problems, possibly painful ones before the child is born. If there were no easily available abortions we don't know what would have happened to him. I prefer to choose the side of life. Life is always better. There would have been both trials and blessings from having the child. Because she didn't have the baby she'll never know them. She will have a lot of questions and so will her living child. I wouldn't want to have to deal with those.
In all fairness, though, the author would probably support euthanasia of the sort practiced in the Netherlands (or is it Belgium?), in which a baby with a poor prognosis would be killed legally to prevent "needless suffering." Lacking that option, pre-birth euthanasia was the second-best choice. So I'd at least score her as not being a hypocrite.
Oh - and: "If our boy survived birth, he would be on oxygen and other life supports for a long time."
She doesn't say he'd live a short life -- just that he would have a poor start in life.
Just read the NYT comments. Wow! That's some pro-abortion crowd.
The gray lady has lost her gray matter.
I believe she had the sovereign right to do what she did. Doesn't mean I don't find it sickening.
She acted on faith to save one child while disposing of the other. At least the mother and father are no longer suffering.
That said, since when has the exception set the rule?
What, exactly, is the New York Time's motive to intentionally misrepresent the issue of elective abortions?
Anyway, the mother claimed sovereign rights over another sovereign body. She committed an unprovoked act of war against the other sovereign. The victory was hers. The other sovereign body was dissolved.
Make love, not war!
Jane wrote:
[A] DNR-from-birth seems like it would be more appropriate than an abortion that risks the wanted child, even if for no other reason. Did they not consider this possibility?
But that would be a less significant death. Judy Nicastro sacrificed her son to the goddess.
Well, she's a pro-abortionist, so there's every chance she's exaggerating the risk to the boy. A more likely case is that the OB pointed out to her that because of her advanced age, delivering twins at all was moderately risky, and delivering one with developmental issues even more so. They probably pointed out that if the boy were killed the girl would develop faster and be healthier at birth. She probably weighed all that and also the significant financial cost, and decided to snuff the little kid.
I don't necessarily have a big beef with that. Difficult decisions have to be made sometimes. I wouldn't necessarily send such a person to jail, although she could never be my friend. But air-brushing it with some bullshit I put him gently and lovingly to sleep for his own good sentimentality and using your victim to make political arguments is contemptable. I would hate to be her daughter, knowing that mama is such a self-centered narcissist asshole.
Then again, maybe the daughter will get the chance in 20-30 years to have mama put gently and lovingly to sleep, for her own good. At least, that's how I'd arrange it if I were God.
An interesting wrinkle here is the IVF which quite often results in multiples. Can't wait for the Times story questioning whether there should, say, be an upper age limit to IVF to avoid situations like this.
And Moloch laughs.
her life was risked in order to avoid the pain of a severely disabled baby.
I didn't even think of that. See, that's one of the problems with Roe v. Wade. It's created this (for lack of a better word) abortion cult. I imagine mom never considered that she was risking her healthy child's life. Or her own life!
The Supreme Court cases talk of "choice" like it's a matter of faith that cannot be questioned or denied. You have to have a choice! And they don't want to affect or influence that choice. So any health danger from an abortion is routinely denied. It's an ideological faith that shies away from facts (or reason).
The Supreme Court--none of whom have been to medical school--insist that abortion is always safer than birth. They particularly did this in the early years of the opinion, when abortion was not to be questioned at all.
So the Supreme Court said that saline amniocentesis is safer than birth (in Danforth). And they said the D&E is safer than birth (in Akron).
This is obscene stuff. Even if you're pro-choice, it should be obscene. We know birth is safer than D&E, because abortion doctors started inducing labor and giving birth to babies to avoid the D&E.
And saline amniocentesis involves injecting massive qualities of salt into the uterus, which causes mom to give birth to a scalded, burnt corpse. So, in effect, the Supreme Court is claiming that giving birth to a scalded, dead baby is safer than giving birth to a live one. And having massive qualities of salt injecting into your uterus is safer than not!
This is such a preposterous and absurd thing to believe. But they do believe it, and say it, with all the passionate faith in social science they can muster. You see, the attorneys arguing the case have checked the death statistics, and they have found more deaths due to pregnancy than abortion.
The (obvious) reason this social science is horrible is because abortions are hidden. Duh! It doesn't become an abortion death statistic unless somebody writes "abortion" on the death certificate.
One might also add that a abortion death might get written down as a pregnancy death out of a sense of compassion for the family.
The Supreme Court no longer makes the absurd argument that abortion is always safer than birth. But neither have they apologized or admitted error for the way they have covered up all the risks of the abortion surgery to the mother.
We might also blame the pro-life movement for this state of affairs!
If there was no baby, if Roe v. Wade was a right to control your body, it would have been overruled a long time ago.
Pro-choice people talk about abortion as if it's just the removal of unwanted tissue. Okay, assume that's true. There is no baby. We're just talking about unwanted tissue that a woman is paying a doctor to remove from her body.
In this case, Roe is still horrible law. The right to control your body is, in effect, a right to pay for risky medical procedures that might damage you! The similarities to Lochner are obvious, since paying for surgery is contract. And when the facts come out about the danger of this elective tissue-removing, the case is overruled.
Of course the state can outlaw an elective medical procedure that risks your health. The state regulates the health industry all the time!
But the pro-life movement, of course, accuses the Supreme Court of infanticide. And the Court has to cover that up and deny it. "Overruling under fire" would be like acknowledging the Supreme Court has killed some innocent people. And the Supreme Court has no interest in admitting that.
So all these injuries to women by abortion get swept under the rug.
Of course, libertarians might argue for a right to plastic surgery, since no baby is being killed in this scenario, and liberty trumps health for libertarians.
But none of the people writing this stuff are libertarians! They don't believe in a right to contract. They jump up and down about the evils of Lochner. And they believe all industry can (and should) be regulated by the state to protect our health.
So I do not believe these liberals would find an unenumerated right to do plastic surgery, particularly in the face of injuries or deaths.
One might add that plastic surgery (like abortion) is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath. The point of that oath is to protect the patient's health. When you do elective surgery, by definition you are no longer in the business of protecting your patient's health. You are now in the business of making money. And you are risking your patient's health in order to perform a surgery on them. Hippocrates would say this is a perversion of your medical skills.
Finally, note how the Supreme Court's horrible social science has corrupted this argument.
We say abortion is often "elective." Thus it's like plastic surgery. You don't have to have the surgery. That's what elective means. You have a choice.
But the Supreme Court's bad social science has corrupted this. The Supreme Court continues to insist that pregnancy is dangerous, and risky to the woman. You could die!
Thus every pregnant mother is running the risk of pregnancy.
This argument suggests there are no "elective" abortions, apparently. Every abortion is saving a woman's life, because she's already facing the deadly risk of pregnancy. Pregnancy is a health risk--an illness--and abortion is the cure.
As Dr. Hern, the author of Abortion Practice puts it, “Abortion is the indicated treatment for pregnancy.”
He also adds that abortion is 111 times safer than pregnancy. And he says this because he's seen the death certificates marked "pregnancy" and the death certificates marked "abortion," and one outnumbers the other, by a lot.
"He died in a warm and loving place, inside me."
What a disgusting display of unbridled female solipsism. What an awful example of unmoored humanity. This is what feminism has given us.
(And I knew without clicking that the link would be to an article in the always loathsome NY Times.)
An interesting wrinkle here is the IVF which quite often results in multiples.
Our culture is so determined to warn people about the risk of pregnancy, and how we have to control for it. We train our children to use birth control. Indoctrination!
Birth control is good, birth control is good, birth control is good!
And I like birth control. (Obviously, I'm not a Catholic!) But consider how our society's determination to control birth corrupts our thinking.
Women go into their 30's, and have no idea how hard it is going to be for them to get pregnant. 90% of your eggs, dead at age 30. 95% at age 35. By 40 your eggs are 99% dead.
And you have an increased risk for a difficult pregnancy, for injuries to your baby, for Down's syndrome.
Imagine a culture that indoctrinates our children, "Have a baby early, have a baby early, have a baby early." You can't! Impossible.
Our culture says birth control, even to people who want children. Our culture says, "you can time it, you have the power, the choice is yours." And then, when you've waited so long that sex no longer results in reproduction, our culture says, "science can help, test tubes."
So our birth control society results in IVF treatments and fertility drugs. Twins, triplets, quadruples, octomom! And increases in handicapped children and Down's syndrome. Which our society says it is right to terminate them.
Welcome to the mad scientist lab of the liberal mind.
We have heard of women cutting off their breasts in order to avoid breast cancer. Althouse admires this, and you can see why. She's like an amazon! Amazon warriors cut off one breast so they could more easily fire a bow and arrow. (I question the sanity of that, by the way). But you can see why Althouse might admire it. The woman is taking control of her life.
One thing feminism has denied (out of, I suppose, guilt) is that estrogen-based birth control pills (yes, that pill, the miracle of birth control, the pill!) increases the risk for breast cancer. And (it is hotly disputed) abortion also increases the risk for breast cancer. Since both the estrogen-based birth control pill and abortion flood your body with estrogen, which is the cause of breast cancer. (This is why women are 100 times more likely to get breast cancer than men).
It is undisputed, by the way, that having a baby decreases your risk for breast cancer. This is particularly true if you are underage. If it's your first pregnancy, have a baby, give her up for adoption. You will be doing your own health a big favor.
It should be malpractice for a doctor to do an abortion on a pregnant girl without getting a family history of breast cancer. While it's hotly disputed that abortion increases the risk for cancer, there is no dispute whatsoever that having a baby actually has a protective effect.
On D&E being safer than childbirth--
D&C actually carries major risks too! I know this because, when I miscarried a baby, the doctor sat me down and when through the risks of a D&C versus waiting for things to take their natural course.
And this was in a case where everything was already coming out, so there was very little scraping involved.
I have friends who've had multiple D&Cs for things like miscarriages and polyps, and each one is a major uterine surgery.
They actually have a huge chance of complications if they get pregnant again.
Physiologically speaking, the idea of an 'elective' D&C is insane. They destroy your future fertility and put your future children at risk. They out you on track for an early hysterectomy.
We've been lying to women for years. Also, pro-abortion types treat D&Cs as if they're minor procedures, meaning that the women get up and go back to normal activity in 24 hours. This ALSO creates future health issues.
My friends who've had D&C's can't drive or do stairs for a week after.
Minor procedure, my *SS. It's just that abortionists know that noone will oversee them or sue them, so they're fine lying to women.
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Saint Croix:
This is beginning to make sense. Contrary to my understanding of evolutionary fitness, they suggest that procreation is a dysfunctional behavior. I now understand their perspective.
There are several good reasons to regard procreation as dysfunctional. First, procreation interferes with taxable activity. Second, procreation reduces availability for sex. Third, procreation creates competing interests, often of the wrong kind.
There is actually a fourth reason, delaying procreation increases risk to the mother, as well as the child suffering from physical and mental impairments.
Am I being too cynical? Perhaps not. After all, evolutionary fitness is not necessarily a property of a species, but of a class; and, until recently, a feudal order was the predominant order in this world.
Basically, she didn't want to be bothered with--to go through the emotional pain of--having a child who MIGHT need special treatment, special attention. So she killed him.
Is this the proper exercise of sovereignty? Fiddlesticks. By using IVF she went out of her way to create this baby, and then, when there were apparently going to be difficulties, she went out of her way to uncreate him.
That's not asserting sovereignty over HER body, that's asserting ontological sovereignty over the creation and destruction of other human beings. I would call it Luciferian hubris.
Ah, but the article starts with such a breezy framing: "Parenthood begins when . . . " So much easier than grappling with the beginning of life.
Anyway, I've a friend who has a significant genetic defect, and if not 24/7 managed, is fatal -- though it's not visible to the eye. And she's passed it on to her son. If her mom called every day to apologize for not aborting her -- "I didn't know. I just didn't know." -- my friend's response would be, "Mom, I'm sitting on a beach watching the sunset with my husband. Your grandson is growing up beautifully. My life is good."
I've another friend whose son was born with spina bifida -- a defect most obvious to any casual observer. He's now a successful senior in college. And every day he calls his mom to say, "Thanks for hanging in there mom, and sticking with me."
So who are we, anyway? That's the question. Who do we think WE are? The God-playing game is not one I wish to play. When I read genetic-engineering books in college, they stretched the limits of plausible sci-fi. Not any more.
I wonder what these pro-IVF pro-'selective reduction' types will do when the baby who looked so perfect on the ultrasound turns out to be cranky, or to hate school, or to drive to fast, or to refuse to call on weekends.
You really have very little control over the personalities you're given, and I suspect these moms are going to face a steep learning curve when little Mia Angelina turns out to be a goth.
And there are plenty of kids who aren't physically perfect but who are smart, sweet, funny, and great company.
I mean, why the emphasis on physical perfection? Isn't that a little.... creepy?
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