Abortion

[Barry]

https://youtu.be/sEiPFXRRhjY

I like the question about why it is a murder charge killing a child in the womb through a shooting or even reckless driving, but not when a perfectly healthy child is taken and destroyed by a surgeon. Legal, yes, but totally immoral. I stand, as he does, for the unborn healthy children.

[johnofgwent]

Well, this digs up why the church and I parted company so I might as well say it again.

I have two daughters. I should have three.

In 1988, a year after Sarah became "the girl who lived" by being too sick to receive heart surgery from a pair of utterly incompetent twats in Bristol, who killed everyone except Sarah on their patient list,  Moira found herself pregnant again

The 14 or is it 16 week ultrasound scan, which was only given in 86 to parents who agreed IN ADVANCE to consent to counselling to abort spina bifida babies, was now far more widespread and offered routinely.

As we knew by then what to look for with ventricular septal defects we were keen to view the heart and blood vessels. 

I should have looked harder, and lower down.

The radiologist was strangely quiet

We were asked to return in a month

We realised then that something was wrong.

On returning at 23 weeks for the second scan, We were told the foetus had no detectable diaphragm and that the stomach and intestines were growing in the space the lungs normally.hsd reserved to themselves.

The problem is a known gastrula stage defect, cells in the growing fertilised egg that would normally firm the division between thorax and abdomen don't grow properly if at all and a hole is left where a sheet of muscle should be.

The prognosis isn't good. In maybe five per cent of such cases the diaphragm does develop to the point caesarean section follow d by immediate wide open surgery allows the doctor to stitch the diaphragm together and days in a forced ventilation ICU might allow the child to survive. In the other 95% the death is inevitable.

It took us 15 seconds to ask for a termination.

A termination at 24 weeks right on the very cusp of illegality.

In essence Moira was given the same drugs she endured two years earlier when Sarah was so reluctant to home out it threatened pre-eclampsia. The 24 week old developed foetus would have to be born and die. 

It took about five hours. Emma emerged blue and still but wriggled a little. There were no cries of course, she had no way to inflate her lungs to breathe. And after about 15:seconds, she died. The staff tried to prevent me seeing anything but five foot six of size 12 nurse versus 16 stone of six foot three Viking was only going to end one way.

I don't blame them of course.

The real problem was the fucking politicians 

David Steels pal Lord Alton was trying at this very time to make abortions at this stage illegal, which would have forced Moira to pointlessly endure another 15 weeks and then arrange a funeral for a stillbirth.

We've held a funeral for a cot death... (My brother woke up one morning to find his then three month old son David, born within a month of sarah, cold, blue and stiff). The hole in an Aberbargoed Mountainside was so very, very deep and the little white box they put in it so very, very tiny)

Steel and his bastard pal were rather keen to say being forced to hold a funeral for a dead child was so very usefully cathartic, and far too many of his lickspittle Tory chums were voting his way....

I did offer to slaughter a few of their firstborn son they could share the experience I and my brother got handed so they could vote with hindsight, but few seemed keen to become knowledgeable .....

It was this issue that restored my faith in real politicians. Our then MP, Paul Flynn, announced in the paper he was going to vote with Alton and asked his constituents to give him their thoughts.

I did. I pointed out that Emma's condition like many others were not detectable before 22 to 23 weeks and that his vote would have forced my wife to carry a dead child to full term. I asked him to ask the consultant, and then decide which way to vote.

He did, and he voted against Alton and told him to his face why.

The condolence book opened after Flynns death includes an entry from me, mourning the passing of an MP willing to ask his constituents opinions, research the truth for himself and act on it, which I said there was a quality all too lacking in London's current 649...

I vowed at the time to punch Alton in the face if I met him, and piss on his grave if I could. That vow stands

It slightly amused me to find the BBC Holby City Writers gave "Jac Naylor" the exact same developmental condition in the fictional kid her character was to give birth to. Not the first time I found my family's real life nicked by one of the Holby Script Writers, and not the last. They named the baby Emma too. That was about the point the wife switched the TV off and started on the gin.

In Holby the five per cent miracle happenned if course. 

Emma was taken away and used for research into the condition that caused the developmental failure. The doctors asked me for consent, which is more than anyone at Alder Hay were asked to give.  For several years Emma lay pickled in bits in jars in the fifth floor lab that was my old office at University Hospital, but few in the clinical end of things knew my connections to the department.

One day i really will find an excuse to pop back and see if she's still there.

Ah yes, the church


I've never been the full on Billy Graham type and I admit when three black guys stood up during my sermon at Hannah St in the thick of Tiger Bay raised their hands and cried out "Hallelujia, praise De lawd" I was a tad flummoxed. But Moira was a bit more involved and I suppose Emma's replacement, Jennifer, seems likely to be a vicars wife or the equivalent for the lay ministry....

But St Julian's Methodist cut her dead like a leper when they found she'd had an abortion

Apart from their vicar. Glyn was many things including one of the chaplains to the SAS in Hereford. And you don't do that job without having certain standards....

He told the church congregation to go forth and multiply and walked out about a week after he heard how they'd treated Moira.

Well there you are.

Now if you want to discuss abortion after rape, and what to do when your daughter is raped by an Islamic and won't get rid of it, I'll start a new comment to discuss Sarah and Melissa, who us now heading for 12 and one day needs to be told her dad was a dodgy bastard who came over here to infect as many white teenagers as he could with HIV, ran away when he realised who my pals voted for, and died hopefully in  absolute agony in an Indian shithole before I could dissect him alive without the administration of an anaesthetic and with only curare to hold him still.

Yes, this is a bit of a mastermind specialist subject for me.

Be glad it wasn't you in the next patient cubicle. 

[patman post]

Medical and rape yes, but as a substitute for taking care no.

But the onus of care must be on both the mother and the father — until that can be assured, it seems cruel to blight at least two lives by withholding access to legal and safe abortion...

[cromwell]

Medical and rape yes, but as a substitute for taking care no.

Yep would agree with that and for the less than careful there is the morning after pill.

[Nick]

Medical and rape yes, but as a substitute for taking care no. 

[Streetwalker]

  Making abortion illegal  just makes it a tourist industry 

[Barry]

In America again, Roe v Wade may be overturned, which could be good news for unborn babies.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-59340789

[Barry]

"I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born."

― Ronald Reagan