After two years, many questions remain unanswered about a healthy unborn baby who was aborted in Ireland after prenatal tests falsely predicted that the baby had a potentially fatal disability.
Every abortion is a tragedy, no matter how healthy or sick an unborn baby is, but the case drew attention to the horrific reality of abortion soon after Ireland legalized it.
The baby’s parents, who are not named in reports, said they wanted their child and would not have gone through with the abortion if they had known that the child was healthy.
The Irish Independent reports an investigation into the matter stalled this spring after the baby’s parents and the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street failed to reach an agreement about the focus of the investigation.
Dr. Peter McKenna, head of the Ireland Health Service National Women and Infants Health Programme, was appointed as a mediator in the case, but he did not succeed in helping the two parties reach a compromise, according to the report.
McKenna recently criticized the Ireland Department of Health for refusing to order an independent review of the case, noting that the hospital is taxpayer-funded. He said health leaders should order an investigation.
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Here’s more from the report:
“The aim was that the family could obtain an acknowledgement of the significance of the event that had occurred, an apology for that event and an explanation as to how the hospital had ensured a similar event could not happen again.
“A secondary aim, important to the family, was that a report could be produced that would synopsise what had happened, how the adverse outcome had arisen and the steps taken to ensure the event could not happen again.”
In March 2019, the mother went through with the abortion at 15 weeks of pregnancy after two tests indicated their unborn baby may have Trisomy 18, a severe but not always fatal chromosomal abnormality. The prenatal tests are supposed to be 99-percent accurate, but a third more conclusive test after the abortion revealed that the baby did not have the disorder.
A short time afterward, the couple filed a complaint against the National Maternity Hospital in Holles Street, Dublin, saying they very much wanted their baby. Reports suggest the unnamed couple would not have had the abortion if they had known their child would be born healthy.
At the time, The Independent reported medical professionals who approved the abortion allegedly never examined or even met the mother before she aborted her baby.
Ireland allows abortions up to 12 weeks for any reason and later in pregnancy for fetal anomalies and other limited circumstances.
The whole situation is a tragedy, but just as tragic is that if the unborn baby had had Trisomy 18, there would be no story, no sympathy. In today’s culture, it is considered acceptable – compassionate, even — to violently destroy the life of an unborn baby with disabilities in an abortion, even late into the pregnancy. Society says it is ok to discriminate against a human being with disabilities, as long as they still are in the womb.
