‘To us, she was Emily’
January 9th, 2010In the Life and Style section of the [UK] Guardian, a lengthy first-person account of a couple who chose abortion after prenatal tests brought a diagnosis of Down syndrome. Nick Hinton reports that the decision gradually tore his family apart. An excerpt:
I spent a lot of time wondering where it had gone so horribly wrong. Was the decision to terminate the pregnancy to blame? Not in itself, though I worried that my insistence on its being Fiona’s decision was something of a cop-out. Perhaps I should have offered myself as more of a sounding-board or even a punch-bag. Fiona never reproached me with a lack of support, or even hinted at it. But that dreadful period undoubtedly opened up a crack between us, a crack that later deepened into a rift that could not be healed.
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