It happens more than the pro-abortion community would like to admit: Doctors advise parents that the baby the mother is carrying will be born with tragic abnormalities and should be aborted — but then, miraculously, the baby is born completely whole and healthy.
Such was the case in Northern Ireland recently when Melanie and Damien Sheenan faced intense pressure from medical “experts” to end the life of the baby developing safely in Melanie’s womb. An ultrasound at 20 weeks of pregnancy revealed what the doctors insisted was a serious “fetal abnormality.” The doctors informed the Sheenans that their baby’s brain and spine had not formed. After further scans and diagnoses, doctors strongly advised that the sensible choice for the devastated couple was to abort the “fetus.”
“They didn’t even think his life would begin,” Damien told the UK’s Christian Institute, adding that he and his wife were told that the baby would be incompatible with life.
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Melanie said doctors insisted the child wouldn’t survive birth, and even if it did its disabilities would be so profound that it would have no quality of life. “I was put under immense pressure to go ahead with an abortion,” she said, and “we were made to feel we were doing something terribly wrong by wanting to keep our baby.”
She recalled that medical personnel called her on her cell and home phone to tell her “how many days and weeks that I had left until my 24-week cut-off [to have an abortion]. Whenever we went to appointments, the nurse in charge of the consultant would introduce us as ‘the couple who was continuing with the pregnancy against medical advice.’”
But the Sheenans resolutely decided to continue with the pregnancy despite the intense intrusion by doctors — and they were rewarded with the blessing of Joshua, now a healthy one-year-old baby boy and an active and rambunctious witness against the global abortion culture that has manipulated, bullied, and deceived parents into killing untold millions of babies.
“If we had gone with the doctors’ diagnosis he wouldn’t be here today,” said Melanie, “and I’d be living with the fact that I’d had an abortion and all the effects that might have had on me.”
Damien Sheenan added that Joshua is “the best thing that’s happened to our family. We couldn’t imagine our family without him now. Just to see the joy and the love that he brings to the house.”
Another woman in the U.K., Lisa Davison, shared a similar story recently of being pressured by doctors to have an abortion, and the reward she received when she refused.
Shortly into her pregnancy doctors told the 40-year-old Davison that her baby’s amniotic sac was not attached to her womb. The additional discovery of a blood clot prompted doctors to warn Davison that both she and the baby may die if she did not terminate the pregnancy. “I was losing a lot of blood and they were really worried for me,” she recalled to LifeSiteNews.com. “I was in hospital for three months because I was bleeding so much, and everyday I was being told the baby wasn’t going to survive.”
Despite the pressure to abort her baby, “something in my head told me to keep him,” said Davison. “Somehow I was always sure he was going to be okay. Somehow I just always had the feeling he would make it.”
Davison’s “feeling” turned out to be prophetic when little Danny was born by emergency Caesarean section at 33 weeks into the pregnancy, weighing just four pounds, four ounces.
Indeed, things were touch and go for Danny at birth, who needed help to breathe on his own and who soon developed necrotizing enterocolitis, a potentially deadly post-natal bowel infection not uncommon to premature babies.
“He was so ill he had to be resuscitated and then had blood transfusions,” recalled his mother. But following weeks of intensive care and surgery, things began to turn around for Danny.
Today the baby that doctors advised Lisa Davison to abort is a healthy seven-month-old. “When I look at him now, I really can’t believe it. He shouldn’t be here but he is, and he’s a joy to look at everyday,” Davison told her local newspaper, the Newcastle Chronicle.
While Davison said the pregnancy and birth of her third child was an “incredible journey, and a very hard one,” she added that “when I look back, I’m so happy I made the decision I did.”
The Sheenans are encouraging couples in situations similar to theirs — facing a pregnancy with an uncertain conclusion — to give their child the blessing of life despite what doctors warn.
“Even if mothers get hours, days, or weeks with their baby, they say that it is the most precious time,” Melanie advised. “And in our circumstance, the doctors’ diagnosis was completely incorrect…. If we would have [gone] with the doctors’ diagnosis, he wouldn’t be here today.”
She said that “the best advice I can give is to carry on, because it is still a life, and God still has a plan.”
