The Utterly Amazing Story of a Baby Who Survived an RU 486 Abortion

National   |   Dave Andrusko   |   Aug 22, 2014   |   9:57AM   |   Washington, DC

What an incredible story! An abortion that “failed,” a couple that then desperately wanted their baby girl to make it, a series of near fatal medical complications, compounded by guilt there will be after-effects from a chemical abortion performed on their child who was born healthy three weeks ago.

Such is the amazing story of Shannon Skinner and Anthony Hunt and their baby, Amelia. It began before Amelia was even conceived, according to Helen Weathers, in a story that ran in Thursday’s edition of The Daily Mail newspaper.

amelia2Skinner was determined not to get pregnant “after the traumatic birth of her first daughter, Lacie, which resulted in a third-degree tear and ruptured internal organs,” Weathers reported. But when she did become pregnant, she was “advised by doctors that another pregnancy could pose a serious risk to her physical health, coming so soon after major repair surgery, Shannon felt she had no choice but to have an abortion.”

Skinner said “my first instinct was to keep her,” but “I kept thinking of Lacie and how unfair it would be on her if anything happened to me and she was left alone or I couldn’t look after her.”

At almost eight weeks, Skinner went to an abortion clinic for a chemical abortion—the two-drug RU-486 abortion technique. In the waiting room, they almost changed their mind. But Skinner says she kept thinking of Lacie, adding tellingly, “Because I was only eight weeks gone, I told myself it wasn’t a baby yet and it would be like a miscarriage.”

The narrative of what followed illustrates that chemical abortions (or “medical” abortions, as pro-abortionists prefer to call them) don’t always (fortunately!) kill the child.

The abortion clinic gave “Shannon two pregnancy tests to use three and four weeks after the termination and told her to call them if she had any problems.”

First at three week and then at four weeks, she took the test. Both were positive, according to Weathers. However her GP told Skinner, after a third test, that she was not pregnant.

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But a fourth home pregnancy test in December proved positive. Skinner, understandably, thought she was pregnant a third time.

“Referred for an emergency scan, and expecting to see just the beginnings of another new life, she was distraught to be told that the foetus she was carrying was the same baby she thought had been aborted.”

“I was out of my mind with worry that the abortion pills had affected the baby,” Skinner told Weathers.

And the risk of injuring the baby that you have “failed” to abort is real. At 20 weeks doctors told her “that the abortion drugs created a higher risk of birth defects, including limb deformities, skull and central nervous system defects, she was advised to have a surgical abortion,” Weathers reported. But to have a surgical abortion, Skinner said,

“would have involved going into labour and giving birth to a dead baby. I just knew I couldn’t go through that and then have nothing at the end of it.’

“To survive the first abortion, my daughter obviously wanted to be here and I couldn’t go through with a surgical abortion. It didn’t matter to me if she was born healthy or not.”

Skinner added, “To see your daughter’s face [on an emergency scan taken Christmas Eve] and then be told you can still go through with an abortion . . . how can you?”

But there were many problems those next few months (“At times we really thought we were going to lose Amelia,” Hunt said) before Skinner delivered Amelia via “an elective Caesarean on medical advice because labour could have caused the scar tissue from her previous surgery to rupture, causing a life-threatening haemorrhage,” Weathers explained.

What are they going to tell Amelia, they were asked. “I really don’t know what we’ll say,” admits Hunt. “It’s such a rare thing to have happened, but we hope when she is old enough she’ll understand. What she needs to know is that she is loved and wanted.

“If we had the chance again we would do everything differently, but we thought we were doing the right thing at the time.”

As for Skinner, Weathers writes

“Shannon hopes her daughter will understand how special she is, how her mother never really wanted an abortion in the first place and was only following medical advice, and how she wept tears of grief when she thought she had no choice.

“’I’ll always regret the abortion, but I’ll never regret having Amelia,’ says Shannon.”

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared at National Right to Life News Today.