One Man's Thoughts on Abortion
adam loumeau
Which maybe it was/is. But anyway, the abortion debate was all theoretical for me. Until it became personal.
When my wife was six months pregnant with our third child, we went to have an ultrasound and the tech grew very quiet. She saw something, something that looked like a significant problem with our unborn son’s spinal cord. We would need to go to the big city for more sophisticated imaging, but based on what she and the doctor saw, our son would be born with a spinal cord split by a bone in the middle – think a large boulder in a stream – and the spinal cord was tethered to his tailbone.
That likely meant difficulty walking and ultimate loss of mobility; it also might have portended problems with is cognitive ability. We were terrified.
At the big city medical center we had 3D imaging done, and as we were waiting for the results and a chance to speak with the chief neurologist, an orthopedist came in to talk to us. And he basically said: So, you’ll be having an abortion then?
As in, he took it for granted that a middle class, professional couple like us would naturally abort a child in such a condition. And I got that he came to that “conclusion” based on experience.
At that moment I was possibly more offended than I’d ever been in my life. It occurred to me: This isn’t some fetus. This is my son. And whatever his physical problems, we will love him and we will take care of him, because that’s what you do, that’s what so many parents must do.
And ultimately, the original imaging was wrong: the more sophisticated imaging showed that yes, he would have scoliosis but no more.
I wondered how many parents had aborted their child on the basis of a faulty diagnosis.
And more than that, it occurred to me that anyone who would abort a child in those circumstances, I just couldn’t grasp and I couldn’t respect. Because by that stage of a pregnancy those who have knowingly kept their babies are expecting them to indeed be born. And that anyone could turn and decide to abort after they’ve already accepted that the fetus is in fact a child, I just thought that monstrous.
And what bugs me most about the abortion debate is that there can be no empirical truth. When does life begin? When does a fetus become an unborn child? It’s all subjective. One woman/couple can dismiss a pregnancy as a mere “clump of cells” while a second may grieve in the event of a miscarriage because she believes it to be much more than a mere clump of cells.
Who’s right? They both have to be right. They can both be right about the same “clump of cells”; because there is no empirical truth, it’s all about what you believe to be truth, what “your” truth is.
That being the case, what could possibly be morally impermissible about aborting a fetus at six months, at nine months, even after the child is actually born? What, we think consensus should govern this? What if “my” truth tells me something different?
And when there is no empirical truth, only “my” truth, we’re sliding down the slippery slope at 60 mph. And not just on this issue, either."
Ron Loumeau
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