I suppose I am angry that there is no apparent 'culture' of carrying to term a sick baby in the UK. There is no encouragement from the medical establishment to keep a baby with abnormalities. The strength to do that has to come from within yourself , with or without the support and encouragement of your partner and family. But my family didn’t want me to have a life looking after a mentally and physically disabled child, who would turn into a mentally and physically disabled adult. And I felt powerless to keep him regardless of everyone’s views. I know this sounds horribly weak, and it is. I was weak.
It was around this time that the BBC’s Panorama programme was aired which showed adults with mental disabilities being abused by their carers. I couldn’t bring myself to ever watch the program; the headlines in the papers were enough. I didn’t want that fate for our child.
And there was another story about how a woman killed her own son, who had autism. Reading this, the old me would have thought ‘how can a mother do that do her own child,’ but now I saw it through different eyes. She wasn’t evil, just utterly at the end of ther rope looking after her severely disabled boy. As much as I wanted to romanticise things and think that maybe we’d cope ok, and that ‘god doesn’t give you what you can’t handle’ (I saw that written on lots of the US pro-life sites), the reality of it was that not everyone is able to cope.
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