The Bergquist house in Naperville was a crowded place, what with crutches and walkers strewn about and 8-year-old Gloria parked in her wheelchair wearing a towel on her head in preparation for her role as Joseph in an impromptu family performance of a Christmas pageant.
Occasional collisions among the six exuberant children were handled with the universal aplomb of youth.
“Watch out, stupid,” ordered 9-year-old Kathy when Debbie, 16, bumped into Kathy and her crutches in a mad rush to show off the family collection of plastic horse figures.
Spina bifida, apparently, confers no increase in respect for older sisters. Nor does it make any other substantive difference in children’s behavior, Sue Bergquist has found.
“They’re just like anybody else,” Bergquist said of her children. “They fight and are stinkers.”
But they are her stinkers, by virtue of the fact that she and her husband, Richard, have adopted them. During the last 15 years, they have taken in six children with various disabilities, including three with spina bifida.
They have done so because they are passionate opponents of abortion. Sue Bergquist, 50, has been arrested more than 15 times for blocking access to abortion clinics, and has paid nearly $1,000 in fines.
Richard Bergquist, 52, a controller in a manufacturing firm, has also been arrested several times. He only rarely risks arrest because he cannot afford to endanger his job by taking time off to go to court.
At demonstrations, Sue Bergquist said, abortion-rights supporters frequently accuse them of indifference to children once they leave the womb.
“They’ll say, `What about all the unwanted children in the world?’ And I’ll say: `There are no unwanted children. We want them. We’ve adopted six,’ ” she said.
She cherishes her children all the more because their birth mothers could have aborted them, but chose instead to bear them and put them up for adoption.
Gloria’s birth mother, for instance, told the Bergquists that her doctor urged her to get an abortion, and told her she was irresponsible to allow a child with such a severe case of spina bifida to be born.
Dr. Eugene Pergament, head of the section of reproduction and genetics at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said that in his experience, virtually all women who learn through prenatal testing that their unborn children have neural-tube defects choose to have abortions.
Bergquist said that abortion-rights demonstrators seem unmoved when she tells them of her commitment. “They just say, `Well, go home and adopt some more,”‘ she said.
Bergquist would like to adopt more. She is hoping to adopt a little girl with spina bifida whom she visited in a foster home in Wisconsin. She does not see why the modest four-bedroom split-level home that now houses a family of nine, including one of the Bergquists’ three grown biological sons, could not hold one more.
It’s a cheerful and surprisingly calm home. In her soft, sweet voice, Sue Bergquist dispenses endless patience and occasional understated discipline.
Kathy and Noelle, 5, who also has spina bifida, sat on the carpet playing with dolls. Debbie, a tall, outgoing girl who was born with microencephaly, a condition in which the head is abnormally small, played checkers with Mary.
Twelve-year-old Mary’s congenital glaucoma left her nearly blind, a fact Mary half-seriously tried to use to her competitive advantage when Debbie double-jumped her.
“I didn’t see that,” she complained as Debbie chortled victoriously. “That’s not fair.”
Michael, 6, who is blind and retarded, sat on his mother’s lap, humming and patting his mother’s cheek. Estimating gestational age is an inexact science, but the Bergquists were told that he was born at 22 weeks’ gestation, weighing only 24 ounces.
Gloria listened to a Bible story on a personal stereo. She has a severe case of spina bifida, a birth defect in which the spine fails to close. Such children have varying degrees of paralysis, along with hydrocephalus, an accumulation of fluid in the brain that usually must be relieved with the surgical insertion of a shunt that carries the fluid to the stomach.
Glory, as the family calls her, has no feeling from her chest down, and usually walks with a walker and braces. But now she sat in a special reclining wheelchair that she is using while recovering from recent surgery for scoliosis, a curvature of the spine that affects about half of spina bifida patients.
She has had 18 operations, including repairs on her three shunts, procedures to loosen tendons in her legs to maintain flexibility and the recent partial fusion of her spine to arrest the scoliosis.
Medical care for five of the children is covered by Medicaid. Richard Bergquist estimated that Glory’s care alone has cost about $300,000.
Her parents bought her a lop-eared rabbit after the last surgery, but the frequent operations are agony for Glory, who sobbed in the doctor’s office when he said she would need the scoliosis surgery.
Hard on the parents
Spina bifida is hard on parents as well. The paralysis affects the urinary system and the bowels. For the two younger girls with spina bifida, Sue Bergquist must insert catheters every few hours to drain their urine, and don rubber gloves and manually remove their bowel movements.
The Bergquists must carry Glory upstairs to be bathed, and manipulate her legs to keep them limber. They examine the girls’ heads regularly to make sure their shunts are working properly, and watch for urinary tract or kidney infection, complications of spina bifida whose symptoms children often cannot feel.
Because children with spina bifida often have learning disabilities, the Bergquists spend a considerable amount of time helping with homework, assistance that Debbie also requires.
The Bergquists see nothing extraordinary about all this. “Some people like tennis. I like children,” Sue Bergquist said. “My children are my life. When you love somebody, you love being with them and doing for them.”
The Adoption Information Center of Illinois, the state’s central adoption information source, does see something extraordinary. In 1988, the center named the Bergquists adoptive family of the year.
“They are really incredible,” said Gary Morgan, chief of adoption and guardianship services for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which operates the center along with the private Child Care Association of Illinois.
“Most people treat these kids in terms of what they can’t do. This is a family that treats kids in terms of what they can do, and takes pride in that.”
The Bergquists will also be honored in a religious service in February that will call attention to the need for families to adopt handicapped children.
The event is being organized by Operation Rescue Chicago, the local chapter of a militant anti-abortion group that blocks abortion clinics across the nation. The Bergquists have been “rescuing” with the group for years.
In April, Operation Rescue began a nationwide effort to encourage adoption of hard-to-place children.
Keith Tucci, executive director of Operation Rescue National, said the National Adoption Project is intended to find homes for children and to attack the argument that abortion should remain legal to prevent the birth of unwanted children.
“The truth is that there are no unwanted babies,” said Tucci, who said Operation Rescue National has been getting about eight inquiries a day since it began publicizing its efforts in November. “There are unknown-about babies.”
There are waiting lists of people eager to adopt children with disabilities like Down’s syndrome and spina bifida, said Mary Beth Seader, vice president of the National Council for Adoption.
It is much more difficult, she said, to place older children who have been abused or neglected; minority children whom some agencies are reluctant to release for placement in a white family; and children with siblings who must also be placed in the same home.
View from the other side
Tucci said that abortion-rights activists have ignored his group’s efforts and have expressed little interest in promoting adoption themselves.
Sue Purrington, executive director of the National Organization for Women in Chicago, said abortion-rights supporters have always backed adoption as a choice that should be available.
“I think it’s fine they’re doing this finally,” she said of Operation Rescue. She said that religious anti-abortion activists have opposed her organization’s efforts to make it easier for gays and lesbians to adopt.
She added that she wished women’s organizations could devote more time to adoption issues. “Unfortunately, we’ve been having to spend our time keeping abortion legal,” she said.
The Bergquists’ commitment to adopting children began with Sue’s fervent belief that abortion is the murder of children, in some cases because they are imperfect.
“When my husband was in the service, I used to volunteer at Misericordia,” a facility near her Southwest Side home where children born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus lived, she said.
It was the early 1960s, and shunts were not yet commonly used. The children had grotesquely swollen heads that weighed as much as 70 pounds.
“They used to call them water-head babies,” Bergquist said. “But I was so touched by their beauty. It was an exquisite look-I remember their turned-up noses, so delicate. I just fell in love with them.”
Soon she had a family of her own. When she was pregnant with her third son, Bergquist, who had grown up a casual Baptist, changed her relationship with God.
“The young man living next door was dying of cancer,” she recalled. “He was about 19 years old, and he was so smart. I watched him die. It took two years.
“When you are carrying a child and you see another young person die like that, you question the meaning of life,” she said. “I found that Jesus is the meaning of life.”
The U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973. Bergquist was devastated. She and her husband decided to get their home licensed for foster care so they could take in unwed pregnant minors.
She began to consider taking in disabled children instead.
“I saw our country zeroing in on handicapped people, saying that if you couldn’t live this perfect life where everything was just sunshine and roses, life wasn’t worth living,” she said. “But I knew God doesn’t make mistakes.”
Fear at first
She asked a DCFS social worker if any children were available. There was one: 14-month-old Debbie.
Doctors told the Bergquists that Debbie should be institutionalized. The thought of adopting her scared Richard Bergquist. “I thought, `How can we handle this child and the potential problems?’ ” he said.
They prayed, and adopted Debbie. Then they adopted Mary. Then one day a DCFS social worker called and said an infant with spina bifida needed a home.
“We went to visit her, and I fell in love with her,” Sue Bergquist said.
Her husband went along with the idea, until she gave him a booklet about what to expect in the next 30 years with a child who has spina bifida.
He read the booklet while his wife was at church. When she returned, she recalls, he was furious.
“He said, `You don’t know what you’re getting into; you don’t know what can happen,’ ” she said. She cried. They didn’t speak for three days.
Then the social worker called to ask for their decision. “I was so scared,” Sue Bergquist said. “I just went in to Dick and said, `Mary Jane is on the phone and she would like our answer.’
“And he said, `Well, this is the last one.’ “
Raising six children with special needs takes time, energy and money. The Bergquists are willing to spend all three.
“I long ago decided that I wasn’t going to buy a new car periodically; I would drive used cars,” Richard Bergquist said. “Some people have a need to drive a new car regularly; I don’t.
“It’s a commitment,” he said, “and this kind of commitment yields great rewards-intangible things, like meaning and purpose to life.”
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In Illinois, 352 children need adoptive homes. Call the Adoption Information Center of Illinois at 800-572-2390.
