Tens of millions of women who have had abortions over the last decades worldwide regret their abortions. Marie Ideson of England is one of them.
Every morning when she wakes up she misses the six-year-old little girl who she named Lillie and planned to give a wonderful life — than is until an amniocenteses discovered Lillie had Down Syndrome.
“Despite any disability, my daughter would have been incredibly well loved. And whatever her future was, I would always have been there for her,” Ideson tells the London Daily Mail newspaper.
But that love will never be given out. Days playing in the rain, carting Lillie off to school, hugs and kisses, applying bandages to scrapped knees. They’re never happen, because Lillie is one of the millions of babies who have been killed by abortion.
Not only did the abortion take Lillie’s life and deprive Ideson of a daughter who could have blessed her life, it tore apart her family. She and her partner had another child but that didn’t save the relationship.
Yet when she was a little over 16 weeks pregnant with Lillie — and having been told by doctors that tests showed her much-wanted daughter had Down’s syndrome — Marie did something that still torments her and which she blames for the breakdown of her marriage: she underwent a termination.
‘Looking back, I was bullied into going ahead with an abortion,’ says Marie, 46, a GP surgery manager. ‘I only wish I could turn the clock back. I think of the daughter I never had every day. I will always regret it.’
‘When I said I wanted to keep the baby, I was told she could be born needing emergency heart surgery and have bowel and muscle tone problems — and that was if she survived.
‘At no time did anyone suggest we might keep our baby. A termination was presented as the only way forward.’
Not only that, but Marie also thinks she was made to feel guilty about wanting to continue with her pregnancy.
‘A nurse said not aborting my baby would cause it to suffer, and she’d only become a burden on society if I went ahead,’ says Marie. ‘She even said: “Ninety-nine per cent of women in your situation wouldn’t want the baby.” ’
About her husband, she says:
She adds: ‘It might sound unreasonable, but I blamed him as well as the doctors for the abortion. He knew I was anti-abortion and that I wanted to keep my baby.
CLICK LIKE IF YOU’RE PRO-LIFE!
‘I was upset that he had allowed me to take the pill and didn’t just take me home. I believed he’d sided with the consultant. And when Reuben arrived, I also realised nothing was going to bring Lillie back and a new baby couldn’t solve the issues in our marriage.’
By the time Reuben was two, the couple had split. Marie, who never signed a consent form for the abortion, spent thousands of pounds in legal fees in a bid to gain an apology from the hospital — although she was eventually forced to abandon legal action due to the expense.
Of her broken marriage she says: ‘I couldn’t get over what happened — neither of us could come to terms with it. The trauma was always there between Allan and I. The rift it caused just couldn’t be healed.’
She says: ‘My eldest sons are now aged 25. When pregnant with them, I knew of women having Down’s syndrome babies. But when I had Reuben, I heard of no one.
‘Today, I never see mums with Down’s syndrome babies. I can’t help feeling other women must be having abortions they don’t want. I can’t believe that everyone who finds out their baby has Down’s syndrome willingly chooses to abort it.’
