Swingtown: Abortion Foe's Plea

Donna M. Stephan-Nolan is the mother of two and works from home as an environmental lawyer. She wrote this essay as part of an ongoing series of first-person stories for the CBS News election-year project "Swingtown," which is looking at voters in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley.

I am ashamed to say that I did not always respect life as much as I do today. When I was in college, I felt like many people do. I was of the mindset that, while I personally do not believe in abortion, I did not think I had the right to tell other people what to do with their bodies. A few lessons along the way taught me otherwise.

I have watched friends and family members struggle desperately to have a child. Some had miscarriages, some gave birth to premature babies that died, some could not conceive without extraordinary means and some could not conceive at all. If you ask the majority of women who have had miscarriages what they lost, they will resoundingly say "a baby." I have never heard a woman who has had a miscarriage refer to her lost child as anything less than "a baby." Yet, those who advocate in favor of abortion describe the unborn child as if it was a nonliving entity. Quite possibly the reason they do so is that the more they dehumanize a fetus, the easier it is for people to accept abortion.

Now for my own story. I am fortunate to have two very beautiful children. They were conceived naturally. When my son was 16 months old, he suffered a head trauma. The CAT scan revealed that he had indicia of hydrocephalus, a condition that is caused by water on the brain and which can lead to neurological impairment. As a result, he had to have an MRI and be evaluated by a pediatric neurologist. Luckily, after much stress and testing, it was determined that his condition was benign and that he had no neurological impairment.

Shortly after that scare, my obstetrician called me in my office early one morning to advise me that my blood work for the child I was carrying showed that the baby might have Down Syndrome. The doctor advised me to have an amnio to determine if the child had Down Syndrome. I refused to do so. I knew that the only possible reason for having the amnio was to determine whether or not I wanted to abort that child.

When my doctor asked me if I was okay with my decision, I responded that if our son at 16 months old had been diagnosed with hydrocephalus, my husband and I would not have decided to kill him because he was no longer the perfect child we thought him to be. Whether the child in my womb had Down Syndrome or not did not matter. It was my child and I loved it no matter what.

That child is now my beautiful, and sometimes challenging, healthy two-year-old daughter. After researching the odds of her having Down Syndrome and the risks of an amnio, I discovered that the risks actually were greater that I might have a miscarriage than that she actually had Down Syndrome. As we see today, she did not have Down Syndrome. If I had had the amnio, I might have lost that perfectly healthy little girl.

I am not trying to tell you what to believe. But if one person reads this essay and thinks twice before putting her child unnecessarily at risk or before aborting her child, than the time I took writing this essay has been well worth it.

By Donna M. Stephan-Nolan