Mother of Three Who Developed Cancer During Each Pregnancy: I’m Aborting Next Time

National   |   Micaiah Bilger   |   Dec 8, 2017   |   6:25PM   |   Chicago, IL

Chicago mom Lea Grover went through a terrifying ordeal when she was diagnosed with cancer during both her pregnancies.

She suffered through bed rest, anemia, crippling pain, cancer treatments and a pre-term cesarean section, along with the agonizing “what ifs” about her health and her children’s. So, Grover understandably was worried when she thought she was pregnant a third time, despite taking precautions against it.

But even more tragically, the “Scary Mommy” blogger decided the best course of action would be to end her unborn baby’s life in an abortion, the Daily Mail reports.

“Although another baby would no doubt fit into our hearts and our lives and our family, the physical toll was too much,” she wrote in a blog post about the decision.

Grover later learned that she was not pregnant and proceeded to have her fallopian tubes removed, but her justification for ending an unborn baby’s life still is concerning.

Grover said she first developed melanoma while pregnant with her oldest daughters, 8-year-old twins. Four years later, when she was pregnant again, the melanoma returned. She said she had six cancerous or precancerous moles removed, as well as several polyps in her colon.

She blamed her pregnancies for the cancer, though the Daily Mail notes that no studies have shown any direct links between pregnancy and cancer.

“Anti-abortion activists sometimes claim that having an abortion increases your risk of breast cancer, and the truth is having a pregnancy can increase your risk of cancer — many cancers. And the longer you’re pregnant, the more often you’re pregnant, the higher the risk is,” Grover wrote.

When she thought she was pregnant a third time, Grover said she quickly began to worry that her cancer would return again, and her life would be in jeopardy. She also was concerned about dying and leaving her born children to grow up without a mother.

She wrote:

We could probably afford another child if I didn’t have to end my career over six months of bed rest and three months or more in an NICU; if we could maintain our health coverage and somehow get by with only the babysitter for childcare during my high-risk pregnancy.

We would definitely love another child. We would cherish another child. But for how long? How long until the aggressive cancer that ran rampant through my pregnant body, and only my pregnant body, dug in its heels and took me down? How long until I left my husband, himself a cancer survivor, in the limbo of waiting for recurrence, alone to care for our brood?

SUPPORT PRO-LIFE NEWS! Please help LifeNews.com with a donation during our End-Of-Year Support Campaign

Grover’s concerns were understandable. The difficulties that she went through with her first two pregnancies would cause anxiety and fear for any parent. But they do not justify intentionally killing an unborn baby’s life.

New research suggests that women can safely undergo cancer treatments while pregnant without any major risks of birth defects. That does not mean having cancer while pregnant is not a terrible ordeal, but the research indicates that abortion is not necessary and that both lives can be saved.

A few sentences later, though, Grover admitted that she and her husband would have aborted the baby even if the pregnancy did not pose a risk to her life or health. She wrote:

Between us hung the unspoken truth that, even if I were not at risk of dying from a pregnancy, even if any baby we created were not in need of emergency, life-saving care before growing long enough to be born on its own, even if a pregnancy did not mean risking my career and income along with my health, it might not be “a good thing.”

She tried to justify her thoughts of abortion with the claim that it was motivated by a deep love for her born children.

“The truth is that we love our children, so profoundly and so deeply, that the horror of having to end a pregnancy, to cancel the creation of a child we already know we would love despite any other conflict, is less than the horror of having to abandon all our children, forever, because of some failure of birth control or fate,” Grover wrote.

Unborn babies are no less human or less worthy of protection than born children, yet Grover and others treat them as if they are. Most women would never think of killing a born child for the reasons that Grover stated. Unborn babies should not be treated any differently just because they are in the womb.