Diagnosis of an abnormality in your unborn baby propels you into a strange alternate universe where everyone around you seems callously happy. You are still outwardly pregnant, and people congratulate you, but you are living with the poisoned chalice of knowledge and choice.
Our baby was diagnosed with spina bifida at a routine scan about halfway through the pregnancy. The prognosis was not good: major, life-saving surgery at birth, no walking, probably no talking. The likelihood that he would survive childhood was murky. My partner and I had to decide whether to raise a severely disabled child or have an abortion.
I think women should have the absolute say over their bodies and the creation – or not – of life, but I never thought I would be able to have an abortion myself. Having been pregnant twice before (resulting in one miscarriage and one healthy baby), I had always thought that, in this situation, I would fight for my child no matter what.
But I didn’t. We decided to have a late termination and, after taking a pill to kill the baby, I gave birth in a side-room off the labour ward of a big London hospital, from where I could hear the cries of healthy babies. The vision of the tiny white coffin that disappeared for cremation haunts my dreams, as do the words: I did this.
One thing that kept me going through the moral conundrums was that my partner – my son’s father, the love of my life – was so certain that termination was the right thing: for us as a couple, for the child, for our son. He put all my doubts into context, supported me and was forthright in his opinion that we were still the same people despite what we had done.
When we first received the diagnosis, I could feel the baby inside me and felt treacherous at every movement that signalled that life was still there. I had mentally ended it days prior to the procedure. I was a mess.
But my partner felt without a shadow of a doubt that, through abortion, this baby would not suffer, that he would return to God, the ball of energy that magics us into creation or whatever you believe in, and that there would be no regret for that infant, no actual loss beyond the hopes and dreams we had for him. He felt that this was a kind of spiritual recycling, and whoever that child might have been would arrive in another form some other time.
I formed a morbid pseudo-National Childbirth Trust group with other women I met who had been through similar losses around 20 weeks, and each of them said the same thing: their partners were 100 per cent set on termination and had none of the moral qualms that we shared with each other.
I began asking the male partners of these women about their experiences. The response was overwhelmingly similar to how my husband felt about it, but the reasons varied. They all felt that termination was less of a moral minefield for fathers and were prepared to tell me why.
Mark, 40, lost his first baby following a diagnosis of ventriculomegaly, a condition in which fluid-filled structures in the brain are too large. “You get asked a lot if you regret that decision [to terminate]. The answer I always give is that I regret having to have made the decision,” he says. “But it was the best for all of us. My wife, me, the boy we lost. And our future children.”
Jay, 33, whose baby had Edwards’ syndrome, feels a bit guilty about his certainty. “It was different for my wife because she already had a connection with the baby. I had hopes and dreams for it – but it didn’t seem real to me. I feel sure that letting him go was a way of saving him from suffering. I might be kidding myself, but I cling to that.”
Harrison, 35, says he and his wife had no way of knowing how it would have affected their lives if their daughter, who had no stomach or kidneys and whose brain had not developed, had lived. “She might well have died at birth or soon after anyway, and I’m glad my wife didn’t have to go to full-term only for that to happen. She was beautiful, perfect to look at, but life is hard enough when your body works properly. What kind of life could she have had? Would we have had?”
Leon, 42, and his wife are awaiting an 18-week scan to find out the extent of unknown chromosomal abnormality in their baby. “It’s a horrible, horrible time. This limbo. But we are reconciled that if the baby’s life limitations are beyond us, we will put our daughter first. My sister had Down’s syndrome and my whole family was shattered by her death and my mother’s life was changed beyond recognition caring for her.”
Jane Fisher, director of the charity Antenatal Results and Choices (an incredible resource for parents in this situation) has spent the past 14 years talking to “thousands” of parents. “Men often articulate the decision as something that feels quite clear to them,” she warns. “But the emotional fallout is significant. They bury some of that because they want to be as helpful as possible to their partner. They feel they have to suppress their own needs because their partner is going through the physical aspects.”
The concern that men are hiding their feelings to support their partners is echoed by Mark, who reveals that he did not feel he had much of a say in their decision. “I would always have been led by my wife. Because it’s her body, after all,” he says.
It is dangerous to suggest fathers find the idea of abortion easier than mothers, but it is true that they can be more detached, more pragmatic about what to do in the circumstances. I told my partner that, if we went ahead with the pregnancy, I would fall apart if our child subsequently died. He said that we should choose the heartbreak available to us now rather than wait for it to happen later.
All names have been changed
Antenatal Results and Choices helpline 0845 077 2290 or 0207 713 7486 via mobile
