I Present to You the Defenders of "Choice"

The blogosphere is abuzz about a CNN story that details a surrogate mother's decision to not abort her child despite the baby's biological parents offering her $10,000 to do so after ultrasounds showed that the baby had major issues including a heart defect and a cleft palate.

While many have strong feelings on this issue, looking at the comments left on the woman's site from "pro-choicers" is an absolute horror. These comments were placed on the woman's personal blog just today. I present to you the defenders of "choice":


How unfortunate for everyone that you decided to bring a child into the world that was not yours, either legally or ethically, and has little chance to survive to adulthood except through numerous surgeries and much pain. Selfish, that's what you are.

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You must have gone through an unimaginably difficult time with fluctuations in your resolve to keep this child or proceed with the abortion, as the CNN article describes. The reason why I believe you made a poor emotional choice (almost cruel) is because this child is now condemned to very difficult life, full of hospital admissions, surgeries, pain and suffering. It is tragic that this child will not even be able to communicate her needs, her pain to caretakers due to cognitive problems.

Since you also didn't have the financial means to pay for the C.S. Mott hospital bill yourself, you gave yourself the liberty to decide for the rest of the state of Michigan and the federal government to pay for the medical care (easily on the order of millions of dollars). This kind of behavior is every "mama bear" like indeed and I regret to say that your intelligence and critical reasoning isn't too far from that either.

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I'm a graduating medical student very familiar with the pediatric cardiology service. I don't know what medical condition your girlfriend's son has; pediatric congenital disease is a wide spectrum, ranging from simple cardiac anomalies to life-threatening ones requiring serial surgeries throughout life (and with often unknown long term prognosis in the later decades of life, since many of these surgeries have been pioneered in recent history). I can tell you, however, (and I guess you'll have to take my word on this unless you're a physician), that holoprosencephaly is devastating condition and this baby's multiple problems spell out a life of tremendous struggle and suffering in one of the most hostile places in the world: the hospital. I'm so happy your girlfriends son has overcome his challenges. Also, as a Michigan tax payer and resident, I disagree with this mother's decision, but unfortunately I am paying for it without a choice. And so are you.

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I read your article in CNN. As a scientist, I considered both sides of the story and refrained from making judgement until the end after all facts had been presented. Throughout the article, I admired your courage to fight for the baby's life and I thought "wow, this woman is so selfless to want to keep and raise such a baby that's not even hers, knowing how much it would cost to her own quality of life."

Then I read the line where you decided you wouldn't raise it - and my opinion of you instantly turned 180 degrees. Sadly, I must tell you are incredibly selfish, heartless, stupid, and above all, a hypocrite. You fought tooth and nail to make a point, to stand up for something you believed in (or wanted the world to believe you believed in), only to talk the talk without walking the walk at the end.

Basically, you claimed that you wanted to save this poor baby that everyone else had given up hope on and abandonned, yet, what did you do in the end? You just dumped it on someone else. Why? Because you know you don't have the money nor ability to care for it. Because you DON"T WANT care for it. You just want to be the hero on newspapers who fought to save a baby but want none of the consequences.

What does that make you? Uttterly selfish, cruel, stupid, and hypocritical. Heroes own up to their actions. You're not a hero.

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You are a monstrously evil, self serving extortionist piece of trailer park trash. I hope you give your children up for adoption, because God knows they could find a better mother anywhere. There's a nice couple in Connecticut who'd love to have them, but they'd have to offer you the right price, right?

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Your choice was based on some pretty weird morality. You apparently think that condemning someone to a life of suffering is preferable to ending it early before a sense of consciousness even develops.

You also very conveniently washed your hands of this mess by letting someone else deal with it. Basically, you were too scared to go through with the abortion because of some religious brainwashing and you were a coward yet again once you realized you couldn't care for the baby. All this to "save" her "immortal" soul.

Pathetic.

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I will only call you brave if you are there to watch every one of Baby S's terrible surgeries. If you are there to watch doctors chop and restitch her tiny little body like a piece of meat, again and again. If you are there to wipe the drool and piss and feces from her body, even after she's old enough to be able to do it herself. If you are there to watch her final death agony, life squelched from her lungs by her crippling deformities. You DON'T get to take the high ground, until you do. You don't get to spend a mountain of money that isn't yours, bring a doomed child into the world, walk away with your hands clean, and call it all an act of love until you have seen first hand the consequences of your actions.

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I do have a personal investment in this story. I pay taxes, and the federal government is financing, via medicaid, the baby's fruitless surgeries. What a ludicrous, ignoble waste of resources. Yes, human lives have a price. And the price of prolonging this baby's inevitable demise is dozens of other children that COULD be helped, but weren't. Have you ever seen the slums of the third world? Have you seen the heart wrenching, grinding poverty of New Delhi? There are legions of children that are in otherwise perfect health who die of simple things like malnutrition. To see immense resources spent on a hopeless case while a hundred lives could otherwise be saved with that same energy and resources drives me mad. Those are real lives that could be saved. Lives that have a fighting chance.

 

This is hardly all of them. I read them until I felt sick. There's more hatred. But if you needed any evidence that pro-choicers aren't actually pro-choice at all but pro-abortion I think this is sufficient evidence.