By Hilary White
LEINSTER, May 24, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Despite her earlier announcement that she had decided against abortion, it seems that “Miss D”, the Irish teenaged mother at the centre of a recent controversial court case, has aborted her anencephalic child after all.
The 17 year-old mother had been four months pregnant and under the care of the Health Services Executive (HSE) of the Republic of Ireland when she came into the public eye. A much publicized court-case in which she was involved centred around the effort to gain permission for her to travel to Britain to have her child aborted.
Ireland has added protections for the unborn to its constitution, but women are free to travel to nearby Britain, where there are few limits on abortion, to have their children killed.
Miss D won the case against the HSE, gaining permission to travel as a minor to Britain for the abortion, but then announced in an interview with the Independent that she had opted for “medical inducement” rather than “surgical abortion” and had developed a relationship with her disabled child.
She said that the diagnosis of anencephaly had prompted her to do an internet search on the condition. She found pro-life websites and decided that her child deserved to live. “There were pictures of babies who had been aborted and I didn’t want that, my baby deserved to live, it deserved more than that,” she told Independent reporter Dearbhail McDonald.
“It was then,” wrote McDonald, “she decided to have the baby medically induced.” But McDonald, in his interview with Miss D, declined to mention that “medically induced” in cases of anencephaly is in fact abortion.
It is unclear if the girl was accurately informed that a premature medical inducement of labour, carried out in order to end the life of her child, is also an abortion.
She said she had bought clothes for the child and intended to bring the body back for burial. In a poignant quote she said, “I think most people think that I must be very silly and that this baby is not much. But this baby means the world to me.”
Now the Independent reporter openly describes “the procedure” Miss D underwent in Britain earlier this month as a “medically induced abortion.” The Independent describes the procedure as the administering of drugs to “to render the foetus non viable,”– dead – and to then induce labour contractions for a still birth of the dead child.
“Induced labour relieves the mother of the psychological trauma of having to carry a non-viable foetus throughout the full term of her pregnancy,” writes McDonald. A child who could survive throughout the full term of pregnancy, however, is not usually considered “non-viable” until natural death, and experts on anencephalic children say that there is no medical danger to a mother in carrying such a child to full term and no medical reason to induce labour early.
“It [the induced labour] was very emotional, but I feel I have got closure now,” Miss D told the Independent.
In the time since the Miss D court case, a poll was taken showing that 2/3 of voters in Ireland support legalizing abortion in cases of a “non-viable” foetus. The use of such “wedge issues” to start the process toward full legalization of abortion is a common tactic of abortion advocates in other countries with legal protections for the unborn. It is through court cases such as that of Miss D that abortion has been legalized in most of the western world.
After High Court judge Liam McKechnie ruled that there was no law that could prevent women travelling to Britain for abortions, the HSE publicly apologized to Miss D for having attempted to prevent the abortion.
After the ruling, the HSE said its senior managers would meet with state solicitors to discuss changes in the organisation’s statutory powers in the light of the Miss D. decision.
Read previous LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Irish Teen Decides Against Abortion of Disabled Baby – Credits Pro-life Websites for Change
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2007/may/07051508.html