UK woman: I wish I'd aborted my 47-year-old son with Down Syndrome

Sixty-nine-year-old Gillian Relf says not to judge her until you've walked in her shoes. And to be sure, that would be one rough walk. The son who was born 47 years ago with Down Syndrome has complicated the life of her and her family in ways she clearly never anticipated. It interrupted not only an anticipated career but also the simple family life she and her husband had envisioned.

And her for, looking back on the experience 47 years in, that's enough to publicly declare that she wishes the son she insists she loves had never lived:

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. Instead, Stephen - who struggles to speak and function in the modern world - has brought a great deal of stress and heartache into our lives.

---

That is why I want to speak in support of the 92 per cent of women who choose to abort their babies after discovering they have Down's Syndrome. Mothers like Suzanne Treussard who bravely told her story in the Daily Mail two weeks ago. Suzanne, who was offered a termination at 15 weeks, braved a backlash of criticism and vitriol from some readers. But I'd challenge any one of them to walk a mile in the shoes of mothers like me, saddled for life as I am, with a needy, difficult, exasperating child who will never grow up, before they judge us. They should experience how it feels to parent a grown man, who is no more able to care for himself than a toddler - and at a time of life when your children should, all things being equal, be taking care of you. They should know how it feels to live every single day under a crushing weight of guilt. They should know how it feels to watch Stephen's constant suffering and witness the almost daily destruction wreaked on all our lives. Now I will agree that no one has the right to judge her. And it's one thing to publicly harbor a wish when you never actually acted on it. She may wish she had never given birth to him and never had to care for him, but she did those things and in my book that's more important than what she wishes. But it's not judging to offer an assessment of the assertion she chose to make publicly. And her assertion is monstrous. No one who ever lived was guaranteed a carefree and easy life, and often the course of your life is determined by the issues that characterize those you love. If you've had a loved one who was addicted, incarcerated, seriously ill, hopelessly lost or steeped in pointless anger and rebellion, then you can also say that your life didn't go exactly the way you'd hoped. At one point or another maybe you even gave voice to an emotion that wished that person had never been born. But to be so convicted on this score that you would express it publicly, in a published op-ed? To put on the record that the life of your alleged loved one should have never been lived? This is steeped in the "quality of life" rationale that always informs the secular left's pro-abortion mindset. Stephen's case is extreme and there is no way he can defend himself. But the principle here, which the left embraces without reservation, is that it's possible and even permissible for one human being to judge the worthiness of another human being to live, based on a "quality of life" metric that turns heavily on whether the human in question causes any sort of inconvenience for the one doing the judging. No one could ever suggest that the Relfs haven't had a difficult experience. Clearly they have. We can all relate on some level to the frustration that comes when you compare the life you hoped for with the one you ended up living - and the gap between the two is obviously far greater in their case than it is for most of us. But God often calls us to take on things that were not in our plans. We may have plans for our lives, but our Creator has the plan, and had it in mind for us from the beginning. He had a plan for Stephen too. This is usually the point where you demand that I tell you what it is, and obviously there's no way I can. But what I do know is this: I am not in a position to conclude his life is not worth living based on what I know, and in spite of the difficulties his condition has caused her, neither is his mother. The reason pro-life people believe in the sanctity of life is that the slightest variation from this principle empowers fallible people to judge other people's worthiness to live, and that opens up all kinds of horror. It is far better to accept that some of us will face difficult sacrifices than to go down that road. I'm sorry for the problems Gillian Relf and her family have had, but not as sorry as I am to read her public declaration that her son should never have lived. I suppose she thinks she can safely say this because he's not capable of reading and understanding it. My guess is that, on a certain level, Stephen knows very well that this is how she feels - which might be the reason he often doesn't want to go to visit his parents. Would you want to spend time with someone who wants you dead?