Lately, more doctors appear to be steering women toward abortion when something goes wrong during pregnancy.
In one recent case, a Chicago area mother said her doctor pressured her to have an abortion when she was diagnosed with cancer, The Daily Mail reports.
“The day that I found out I had cancer, I say it was like a death sentence,” Michelle Jahnke told CBS News. “I knew that if the disease wasn’t going to kill me, the choice that they were telling me to make would.”
Five doctors told her she had a tumor on her colon and told her: ‘This tumor needs to go. So you’re gonna have to terminate your child.’
She said: ‘I knew that if I was to do that, I would have died from a broken heart.’
A TV news producer, Jahnke said she lived a healthy lifestyle and was shocked to hear that she had stage 3 rectal cancer. Doctors discovered a tumor on her colon while she was pregnant and told her that she would have to have an abortion, according to the report.
Heartbroken, Jahnke said she and her husband, Mark, began searching for a solution that would save both her and her unborn child. They found one with Dr. Blase Polite, an oncologist at the University of Chicago, the report states.
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Polite recommended chemotherapy, and it worked. Her daughter, Elana was born in November 2012 without any ill effects from the cancer treatment, according to the report. An encouraging 2015 study in the the New England Journal of Medicine found that pregnancy women can undergo cancer treatments without endangering their unborn babies’ health or lives, LifeNews reported.
Four years later, Jahnke is cancer-free, and both she and her daughter are doing well, the report states.
“People say ‘You’ve saved her life. You were the brave one,’” Jahnke said. “(But) she saved my life. Had I not been pregnant, I don’t know if I would’ve fought so hard. But knowing that I had to fight for her, for her life so that she could be born, and I can see her grow into a woman, I mean, that’s every reason to live.”
She told CBS that she wants her daughter to know that “You’re always stronger than who you think you are.”
It’s an encouraging message to all women facing similar situations. Abortion activists often push vulnerable pregnant women to give into fears that they will not be strong enough or capable enough to care for a child, or that their child will have a bad life because of a disability.
But many families are rising above these troubling situations and proving that they are strong enough to succeed and their unborn babies are worth fighting for.
Another example is Florida mom Courtney Baker. She recently was in the national spotlight after she wrote an open letter to the doctor who pressured her to abort her daughter Emersyn Faith, who has Down syndrome.
Baker wrote to her doctor: “I’m sad you were so very wrong to say a baby with Down syndrome would decrease our quality of life. And I’m heartbroken you might have said that to a mommy even today. But I’m mostly sad you’ll never have the privilege of knowing my daughter, Emersyn. Because, you see, Emersyn has not only added to our quality of life, she’s touched the hearts of thousands. … She’s opened our eyes to true beauty and pure love.”
Baker said Emersyn is proof that children with special needs “can change the world.”
