Today is Day 30 of 31 for 21, a blogging effort to promote awareness of Trisomy 21.
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Several weeks ago, a family on one of the T21 lists that I’m on shared with us that they had been featured on ESPN. In this fifteen minute video, the father shares with tremendous honesty about wanting to abort his daughter when they learned she would be born with Down syndrome, and his journey towards embracing her as perfect as she is.
Avivah
Beautiful video.
Still can’t get pass the way it seems “right” for people to abort (and some drs to advise it…).
It is not directly related but when I gave birth of my 3rd (healthy) baby, the lady next to me discovered I have a very similar heart malformation to the one her baby had… and she had battled against a lot of people “good advice” to abort because he’d have have to go have surgery and might not live a “full life”. And that’s in a case where there is a known surgery which enables the kid to have a healthy life and with no “retarded” issues !
Gosh, that was amazing. So raw and so real. Thank you for sharing.
I had tears streaming down my face as I finished watching. Being 22 weeks pregnant and about to go to my ultrasound probably have something to do with it, but the amazing honesty about how expectations clash with reality and cause one to establish a new reality is what got to me.
After having an easy first baby, I remember giving myself a pat on the back: I must be a great mother. Then my second baby was born, and he was nothing like the first: hard, demanding, colic-y. He tested all of my patience, but I realized that it was up to Hashem to determine whether one ends up with an “easy” or :”difficult” child.
I think how in Russia abortion was the primary form of birth control, and I am not sure how those women could go through so many simply because they did not feel like having a baby. How many missed opportunities…