Two women; two unborn babies about to die.
It’s impossible to read the stories of Rebecca Cohen (“Why I had an abortion after 20 weeks”) and Jeanne Ives (“Why we let our baby’s death come naturally“) without your heart going out to them.
At exactly the same time, during the 20th week of their pregnancies, each learned her baby had incurable defects. Each would have done anything to save her baby, but there was nothing they could do.
“I have never known horror quite like that,” Cohen said, but she had a choice, albeit a horrible one.
Ives said she didn’t have that choice. “I knew the decision to end Mark’s life was neither mine nor my husband’s to make,” she said. “The next four months I cried every day with a kind of grief I had never experienced. Our baby boy was alive inside me, kicking and rolling, and on the day we would welcome Mark to the world, he would die in my arms.”
But she was not alone. She had a faith community that stood with her, was present when Mark was born and during the 45 minutes before he died, his doctor baptized him, “nurses lovingly took baby pictures, dressed him, gave him a teddy bear, took footprints, and treated him with the dignity he deserved as a human being created in the image and likeness of God.”
It seems as though she had this image in mind when she spoke of a “just, merciful and compassionate society” that “cares for those who suffer, including pre-born babies with serious and even fatal conditions,” and that “caring for very sick babies like our son Mark does not entail killing them.”
I don’t know if Cohen believes in God or not. She simply said, “When an abortion was the best of only horrible options, I was beyond grateful that one was available in a safe, compassionate medical establishment.”
Each woman did make a choice, but each has a different answer to the question of whether abortions should be allowed after 20 weeks. One speaks from the bedrock of her faith, the other simply from her own conscience. Whatever decision the lawmakers make, keeping faith out of it won’t be possible.
—Norm Karr, Crown Point, Ind.
