When Their Doctor Said to Abort One Twin to Save the Other, Their Response Was Priceless

State   |   Sarah Zagorski   |   Jan 21, 2015   |   11:38AM   |   Nashville, TN

In 2011, Carmelle and Steve Hartgrove were told that her twin girls had a 30% of survival because they shared an amniotic sac and placenta. Then their doctor recommended that they abort one to save the other; however, the Tennessee couple wouldn’t even consider it.

Carmelle said, “How could I choose between the two? I would always look at the twin which survived and think ‘I killed someone to save you.’ Steve and I didn’t even need to have that conversation – we were united on the decision without having to discuss it.”

Now their daughters, Charis Faith and Connie Grace, are almost two-years-old. They were delivered at 32-weeks and weighed over four pounds each.

“I look at them both now and think about what miracles they really are. In the end, it was not a difficult decision. A 30 per cent chance of survival was good enough for me,” Carmelle concluded.

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According to the Christian Examiner, Dr. C. Brent Boles, a Tennessee obstetrician and gynecologist commented on the doctor’s medical opinion about their daughter’s low chance of survival.

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He said, “While the rare condition exists and the complications are real, the rate of death may have been overestimated. Textbooks state a high death rate of almost half the time, but if you break that down at 30 weeks gestation, 70 percent of babies will be okay.” He added that while there is the risk that one baby could get entangled by the other’s umbilical cord, it doesn’t occur as often as some doctor’s claim.

However, Dr. Boles was more troubled by their doctor’s suggestion to abort one baby than by his faulty statistic.

He said, “First, too many pro-abortion obstetricians will just casually recommend termination of a pregnancy because in their mind it’s an easy solution to a problem. The second problem is doctors are not God and sometimes we are wrong about the things we recommend.”

Additionally, Dr. Boles said that doctors don’t consider the risks that come with abortion. For example, in the case of the Monoamniotic twins, aborting one could risk harm to the other. He said, “Because they shared the placenta as well as the sac, there was no way of (terminating) one without causing risk to the other baby as well. And too often the complications with such abortions are not explained. In my experience pro-abortion physicians, especially abortionist who do the procedures, do not give full and complete disclosure of all risks and potential outcomes of having an abortion.”

Dr. Boles concluded by explaining that abortion can appear to have such a low complication rate because the data is pulled from self-reporting from the abortion facilities. “The process is like asking the mafia to police itself (asking abortionists to self-report medical complications arising from an abortion).”