Encouragement!

I've been in a terrible funk lately, feeling as if nothing I do really matters to anybody. Sunday morning found me curled up on the floor of my shower, crying, broken down from feeling so totally purposeless and alone. I cried out to God to show me that anything I did mattered to anybody, that I was some good to somebody in this life.

I got up this morning, still pretty depressed. I cued up "He Knows My Name" to try to lift my spirits:



And I opened my email. I found this notification from Blogger:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Somebody was looking for "aborting a 20 week fetus...":

I was 100% pro choice until seeing this posting. I am 17 weeks pregnant and was considering "my options" while I await my amnio results. This site absolutely convinced me that at this point it would be murder to abort my child if it has downs syndrome. It actually made my "choice" easier because I will never abort it now.

I invited Anon to keep in touch, and provided some Down Syndrome links.

I remember back when I was in college. I had a pregnancy scare right after getting a rubella vaccine and a series of pelvic x-rays. It'd been told (faslely, it turned out) that the rubella vaccine was so damaging to the fetus that I would "have to have an abortion" if I got pregnant during the three months following the vaccine. I was scared. And this was before home pregnancy tests. I had to wait until my period was two weeks late then pay what was for me a week's grocery money for a blood test. Otherwise I'd have had to wait until I missed a second period to have the freebie urine test for pregnancy.

I remember my anguish as I waited for the time to pass until I could have the test, and the agony of waiting the two days (yes, two days!) for the results. I'd been told by my doctor that the pelvic x-rays showed an enlarged uterus. He would tell me no other possibility than pregnancy to explain it. So I was sure that the pregnancy was already diagnosed on the x-ray, that the test was just going to confirm it.

There I was. I'd been taught in college by my ever-so "pro-choice" professor about how failing to abort a fetus with a disability was "inflicting a disability on a helpless child." I didn't want to do that. But neither did I want to kill my baby.

It wasn't until after the test came back negative, after my mom's OB/GYN examined me and found out that the "enlarged" uterus was just a "tipped" uterus, perfectly normal, that I realized that giving birth wouldn't have been "inflicting a disability on a helpless child." It wasn't like starting out with a perfectly healthy baby and doing something deliberately to cause a disability. It was giving a child who already existed, and was already disabled, a chance at life.

Had somebody made that clear to me before the pregnancy scare, I'd have been spared a lot of anguish. And I remain outraged that women are still guilt-tripped into that same anguish I went through. And many of these women end up aborting their children, so they get to live with having killed their children.

But this woman, regardless of whether or not it turns out her baby has a congenital condition, can relax now. She doesn't have to shoulder this burden of thinking she has some responsibility to choose death.

I hope she keeps in touch!

He knows my name
He knows my every thought
He sees each tear that falls
And He hears me when I call