SYDNEY — An Australian couple whose son was diagnosed with Down syndrome is expressing their relief that they walked out of an abortion facility instead of ending the life of their unborn child.
“I’d made an appointment to have a termination, and we were sitting there, but then my husband dragged me outside,” Claire Martin recalled to the Daily Mail this week. “He said, ‘What are we doing? Lets go home. We can’t kill this baby.’”
“I was relieved,” she said. “I needed someone to say they were on my side.”
Martin and her husband Benjamin had been told during a 15-week ultrasound that their son had Down syndrome. They were advised to abort, and were also influenced by friends and family members who told them that they were “sorry” about the situation.
“I even had one person say to me, ‘If this was a dog, what would you do?’” Martin stated.
Therefore, in being counseled to abort, Martin scheduled an appointment to end her son’s life. But she didn’t really want to do it, and was glad that her husband pulled her out.
When her son, who she named Xavier, was born this past April, she knew that she had done what was right.
“I just remember feeling nothing but love,” Martin said. “It was almost like everything that we’d been through over the past nine months didn’t matter because we had a perfect little baby.”
And while some passersby have made snide comments about Xavier, Martin is thankful that she did not obtain an abortion.
“I have no regrets at all. I have no idea what I was so scared of, but I was absolutely terrified and I did not know what to expect,” she told the Daily Mail. “I’m going to love him no matter what. I’m completely over the moon to be his mum.”
As previously reported, earlier this month, a mother in Florida shared a letter that she wrote to her doctor, who had advised her to abort her Down syndrome daughter.
“I came to you at the most difficult time in my life. I was terrified, anxious and in complete despair. I didn’t know the truth yet about my baby, and that’s what I desperately needed from you,” Courtney Williams Baker wrote. “But instead of support and encouragement, you suggested we abort our child. … I told you her name and you asked us again if we understood how low our quality of life would be with a child with Down syndrome.”
“I’m sad that the tiny beating hearts you see every day don’t fill you with a perpetual awe. I’m sad that the intricate details and the miracle of those sweet little fingers and toes, lungs and eyes and ears, don’t always give you pause,” she wrote. “[M]y prayer is that no other mommy will ever have to go through what I did. My prayer is that you, too, will now see true beauty and pure love with every life displayed on every sonogram.”
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