ABU DHABI // A few weeks before she was due to give birth, a mother was told that her baby would not live to see his first birthday.
The little boy suffers from a chromosomal abnormality that will cause all his organs to gradually shut down. There is no cure, and nothing his mother can do but watch him slowly suffocate.
Doctors at the government hospital where she was cared for say the anomaly was not detected by the dozens of scans and tests carried out during her pregnancy.
The mother does not know if that is true, or if the condition was identified after the 120-day termination period, and they kept it from her for that reason.
She does, however, know two things: “There is no worse pain than watching your baby die; and I would not have kept the baby had I known earlier.”
Her son is now five months old and lies in an intensive care unit where his mother visits him daily. He has a cleft lip, six fingers and toes and his kidneys are underdeveloped, as are his skull and brain.
“How could they not have detected that there was a problem?” she said, adding that she was made aware of potential problems only when she asked to see the baby’s face during his last scan before her delivery date.
Her family said all gifts and chocolates remained untouched since the birth and the baby’s nursery is empty.
Another mother, a 32-year-old Syrian woman, took drastic action to avoid such an ordeal. Three times, knowing each time that her unborn child suffered from an abnormality, she travelled to Syria to have an abortion.
With the first pregnancy, she says: “I knew from the scan that there was something wrong with the baby but I was told that I couldn’t abort the baby because I was already five months pregnant.”
Her baby girl had Turner syndrome, a condition in which a girl is partly or completely missing an X chromosome. Turner syndrome can cause a variety of medical and developmental problems, including reduced height, failure to begin puberty, infertility, heart defects, learning disabilities and social adjustment problems. If the condition had been detected before 120 days, a termination would have been legally permissible.
“How could I keep the child?” she says. “Why would I do such a thing, to bring a child into this world that I knew would suffer? I would be intentionally hurting not only them, but also everyone around them.”
She took the first flight to Syria and had a termination at a clinic there. “I didn’t feel guilty. I knew I had done the right thing,” she says.
A few months later, she became pregnant again. “Because of what happened during my first pregnancy, I knew there was a possibility that the baby would be sick, especially if it was a girl.” It was a girl.
“Doctors at government hospitals were not honest with me and again I found out late and only because I went to different hospitals in the private sector and to Syria.”
After losing three baby girls to terminations, she was blessed with a healthy boy, now 5.
“No one can imagine how hard an abortion is,” she says. “It’s harder than childbirth, but it would have been worse to keep a child that you know will suffer and later die.
“I know it’s illegal, but wouldn’t it be better to adjust the law than to force us to do something that is illegal? This cannot be haram. I think it would be haram for the child’s sake to keep her alive because of a law.
“My husband and I don’t feel guilty. Even our families, even if they didn’t say it out loud, we know they didn’t want us to keep the girls.”
salnuwais@thenational.ae