In 2002, Sheila Elliott went in for a routine examination, and the doctor found that one of the twins she was carrying had a serious heart defect:
The prognosis: Baby B's heart was incompatible with life.An obstetrician explained that the left side of Baby B's heart was seriously undeveloped and unable to pump oxygen-rich blood to the rest of his body.
Sheila and her husband had four options. They could terminate the pregnancy. They could take Baby B home after his birth, make him comfortable, and let him die. They could enroll him for a heart transplant, with the understanding that infant heart donors are exceptionally rare. Or they could have Baby B undergo a series of open-heart surgeries to "re-plumb" his heart.
That last option, known as the Norwood procedure, subjects infants to a long and painful recovery process, with no guarantee of survival.
Even if Baby B survived the surgeries, his heart would eventually give out, and he would need a heart transplant.
More:
Family members conducted a tense debate. The choice to do nothing and bring Baby B home to die struck everyone as cruel. Sheila's father suggested that terminating the pregnancy might be a better option than putting a baby through multiple surgeries. But for Sheila and Jason, longtime Christians, abortion wasn't an option.Surgery seemed their only real choice. "There are some decisions in life you're given," Sheila said. "You just automatically know."
Seventeen weeks into her pregnancy, Sheila visited Dr. Damaris Wright, a Dallas pediatric cardiologist. Dr. Wright told her, "We need a name for this baby. We're going to start praying for him."
Colby was the name they chose. Colby just turned five. Read the whole thing.
I post this story today in part because Dr. Damaris Wright is my son Matthew's cardiologist (he had a small problem with his heart a few years ago that's apparently corrected itself). She's a good doctor, in every sense of the word. The Elliott family has a tremendous burden caring for little Elliott; can you imagine how much more difficult it would be, and would have been, if not for having a doctor like her to help the mom and dad have hope?
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Had Colby's parents been atheists and elected to have the surgery yet there was no faith or prayer involved, the story would have still turned out the way it has.
I am also willing to wager that had there been only prayer and faith, yet no surgery, that this story would have had a sad ending. My point? Science enabled this child to live past expectations, not faith.
But that's just my opinion, of course, and I assume most here will not agree with me.
Martha, thanks, you've got it exactly right. My comadre (that's Spanish for "the mother of my godson") had one run-in with a doctor on what had started out as a very good day. She was telling him the new skills the child had recently mastered, and just about every time she stopped for breath, the doctor would say, "but he has Down Syndrome." Like she hadn't figured that out before? Oy.
And, Sig, another dear friend of mine was raised in the Illinois Mental Health system (after falling out of the Child Welfare system--long story) He died some years ago of a premature heart attack (he was in his 40s). I had been aware that he was having scads of dental work done at the time, but I didn't find out until later that: a) the Illinois Medicaid program that underwrites the health care of mental health system and child welfare system care recipients pays for virtually no dental care, and
b) the latest word from medical experts is that lousy dental care often results in serious heart problems. In short, the "culture of life" killed my friend by scrimping on his dental care. At that, he was "lucky" in ultimately finding employment that allowed him to get caught up on some of that care--many people in his situation would have ended up homeless and still on Medicaid or with no health care at all.
Marian, re your comadre and her son, people seem so worried about stamping out "false hope" that they don't seem to notice how much "false despair" they're imposing. I'd rather stamp that out first. ; ) It was not too long ago that the best medical opinion held out no hope at all for children with Down's syndrome, autism, and even cerebral palsy. Such people were hidden away in custodial care and often allowed to die of treatable ailments. It was "God's will." They could never be part of society. With love and determination, people who cared discovered they could do so much better. Yes, there still are problems we can't fix. But with good medical treatment and humane community support, so many children who would have been "put away" just a generation ago can have pretty decent lives--IF our culture cares enough to invest in them. Sure, doctors need to tell the truth, but maybe they also need to educate themselves on what can be done for the best possible outcome, lest they end up encouraging people to settle for less than what is truly possible.
John Boswell sheds an interesting sidelight on this topic in his book, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. Deformities of various kinds have always been a popular reason for abandoning infants. Apparently, medieval Christians blamed such misfortune on the sins of the parents. Boswell says:
. . . folk beliefs regarding the causes of birth defects, which may always have inspired some abandonments, became incorporated into the official ethical system. Christian couples could not engage in conjugal relations during menstruation, lactation, Lent, or on Sundays, and it was apparently widely believed that violating these rules would produce deformed offspring. Gregory of Tours describes a child with severe birth defects and notes that he was viewed by most people with derision, and the mother, who was blamed for having produced such a child, tearfully confessed that he had been conceived on a Sunday night. Infractions of this sort, Gregory warns, will produce crippled, deformed, or leprous offspring, and Christians should beware lest the deed of one night should haunt them for years thereafter.
There is a strong strand of compassion in historic Christianity. Boswell describes how some monastic orders accepted such unwanted children as "oblates" and raised them. Yet it coexists with an equally strong tendency, as seen above, to blame the victim and punish the helpless. It's such an interesting and tragic contradiction.
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