Posted on 10/23/2014 9:15:24 AM PDT by wagglebee
For the second time in two weeks, a mother has given a shocking and heartbreaking interview in which she admits she would have taken the life of her disabled son in an abortion if she had it to do all over again.
Gillian Relf, 69, regrets having her son, Stephen, who is 47, because he has Down syndrome and requires constant and daily care. She worries about what will happen to her son when she dies.
Relf starts with an embarrassing anecdote about how her son refused to sit in his seat on an airplane as they prepared to leave London for a family trip to Greece.
The pilot had been very patient but, after an hour of the plane waiting on the Tarmac at Heathrow, with my son Stephen refusing to get up off the floor, sit in his seat and buckle up, our bags were removed from the hold and he was carried off the flight, my husband Roy and I walking, hot-cheeked and humiliated, behind.
Our family holiday to Greece would not be going ahead, after all.
And no, Stephen was not an obstreperous toddler when this happened. He was 45 years old. This embarrassing scene happened two years ago and the episode is just one of the many challenges we have faced since Stephen, our second child, was born with Down’s Syndrome.
“So difficult has it been that I can honestly say I wish he hadn’t been born,” Relf continues. “I know this will shock many: this is my son, whom I’ve loved, nurtured and defended for nearly half a century, but if I could go back in time, I would abort him in an instant. I’m now 69 and Roy is 70, and we’ll celebrate our golden wedding anniversary next month.”
Relf recalls how when she and her teenage sweetheart-future husband considered having a family, they wished for a perfect baby.
We were childhood sweethearts and married when I was just 19 and he was 20. I sailed through my first pregnancy with Andrew a year later, and both of us were really looking forward to a second baby to complete our family.
There were no antenatal scans or blood test to detect abnormalities in those days and although I had a sixth sense, call it mother’s intuition, that there was something wrong with my baby, the doctors and midwives insisted I was being hysterical and refused to perform an amniocentesis (where cells are taken from the amniotic fluid and tested). A healthy 22-year-old, with a thriving baby, I was considered very low risk to have a Down’s baby.
Stephen came into the world one Sunday in January 1967 at the Kent & Canterbury Hospital.
The following Wednesday, I looked at him in his cot: his small, almond-shaped eyes, broad, flat nose and the one crease on the palms of his hands.
‘He’s a mongol, isn’t he?’ I gasped to my mother. It sounds shocking now but that was how we used to describe people with Down’s Syndrome in those days.
Relf eventually got confirmation from doctors months later that he son indeed had Down syndrome. Them for a second time in the article, she admits she wish she had killed him in an abortion.
Perhaps you’d expect me to say that, over time, I grew to accept my son’s disability. That now, looking back on that day 47 years later, none of us could imagine life without him, and that I’m grateful I was never given the option to abort.
However, you’d be wrong. Because, while I do love my son, and am fiercely protective of him, I know our lives would have been happier and far less complicated if he had never been born. I do wish I’d had an abortion. I wish it every day.
If he had not been born, I’d have probably gone on to have another baby, we would have had a normal family life and Andrew would have the comfort, rather than the responsibility, of a sibling, after we’re gone.
Sadly, just last week, another mother of a son with disabilities said she too wished she had aborted.
In a heartbreaking article in the Daily Mail, Jill and Iain Kelly admit that if they had known that their five-year-old son, Dylan, would be disabled they would’ve had an abortion.
Jill told the Daily Mail, “I love my son. He’s changed our lives. But if I’d known everything that Dylan would have to go through, and will have to go through, there’s no doubt in my mind that, given the correct information, I would have asked for a termination. I’m adamant about that. And it makes me feel guilty just saying it because Dylan is my world. I love him, he’s an amazing little boy.”
I hear you, friend.
I just have a real problem with the whole mindset. It is Margaret Sanger in nicer clothes. First this, then euthanasia...
We made it for a few thousand years of civilization without simply killing our kids or disabled. Sure it happened. In china. In Nazi Germany. In the Roman empire. History looked well on that!
It’s just frustrating as hell to see this acceptance here.
Cherry, I’m sorry for your son’s disability.
My husband’s aunt is mentally retarded (yes, the old term); she was normal in the womb, but suffered brain damage during delivery. I know for a fact that raising her wasn’t easy; her mother—my husband’s grandmother—and my mother-in-law have talked about it. But there are also lots of fun stories about her.
Even with all the trials involved in her care, I can guarantee you that no one ever wished her dead.
BykrBayb, I’m sorry. God bless you both.
It’s frustrating and shocking. I never expect it, and it’s one of the reasons that wagglebee’s threads are so important.
Indeed. Every single person here should look at their spouse and or kids right now and ask themselves if a car wreck put them in a ‘retarded’ or massively disabled state, how long would it be before they decided it was simply too much trouble.
Then try excusing this woman’s comments. Could they? Would they?
Exactly right.
Norm, I’m sorry, friend.
She should’ve been locked up before she had the chance to reproduce. She is obviously a Sociopath.
Thanks, and I appreciate it. Life happens. I’m far from alone in experiencing that kind of thing. I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all but I could see where this thread was headed. And from who.
Having said all that, I do have trouble with a mother who says everyday she wishes she aborted her disabled son
Today prenatal testing is pushed for every pregnancy and women are encouraged to have an abortion if there is any sign of abnormality. People in both major parties bemoan how such children will place a greater financial burden on society. And there is an ever-increasing push for euthanasia, it's now portrayed as the only "dignified" way to die.
So I wonder, just how different are we from Nazi Germany?
Ping:
Hey KC, you still have the links to those videos on Nazis and the mentally ‘unfit’?
People should watch them completely.
It’s an important question.
Amazing isn’t it? And we are closely following them. It’s a mirror image. We just put nicer words as to what we’re doing and how we do it than they did.
Oh on the ‘dignified’ thing.
Hollywood long promoted the ‘noble’ death of the jilted lover swallowing a hand full of pills, climbing into silk sheets and dying ‘peacefully’ and ‘on their terms’. Lots of movies had that plotline.
They never did show the resulting puke and loss of bowel control on those dignified white sheets though...
Same thing for the two gays on Pacific Coast Highway in the convertable doing a car commercial. Never show Bill and steve in the aids ward later.
People do grow weary, of course. There can be such a thing as "compassion fatigue." But ordinary people can grow to greater and greater compassion when they respond to the everyday stimulus of need. She has --- if her words are indeed honest --- shrunk and shrunk to greater and greater resentment.
I hope she's just in a temporary bad patch, and she'll come out of it eventually. That's a possibility. Maybe she isn't getting the respite she's been needing. That can be very tough.
But if it truly has been chronic, that abiding homicidal ideation on her part is the result of her own daily resentful response. I do feel sorry for her, but I feel sorrier for her son, still living with his mother's radical I-wish-you-were-dead rejection after 47 years.
I can post some this evening :)
how can you call her selfish?....she didn’t ditch her son....he’s not in an institution...he wasn’t left on the side of the road...he wasn’t aborted...he wasn’t battered to death....
______________
There are some things best left unsaid.
Why does everyone think that every thought in their head deserves airing?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
