A hideous story from Nebraska (via NTV):
It’s the story you may have seen, but the side you’ve never heard. A grieving Grand Island couple spoke out to NTV News, after newspapers across the country report they wanted an abortion to end a non-viable pregnancy — only to be denied.
Danielle and Robb Deaver [are] setting the record straight…In reality, they wanted a healthy baby girl, but instead medical complications forced them to make what they call the hardest decision — one that was denied by a new abortion law.
“She was so wanted,” said Danielle Deaver, as she choked back tears. It’s the emotional pain no doctor can ever take away, after learning she could not avoid the physical pain her daughter was experiencing.
Elizabeth Deaver, 22 weeks old, was dying inside her. Without amniotic fluid, she would not develop, Danielle’s uterus was slowly crushing her, and because of a new abortion law on the books, Danielle was told there was nothing she could do.
“People are hearing that we wanted an abortion and that was never the case,” she said. “We want to be very clear that’s not what we wanted, that’s not what we were looking for and that’s not what we were denied.”
What the Deaver’s asked for and were denied, was the option to induce labor. “It wasn’t an easy, frivolous thing that we decided it,” she said, and then added through tears, “It was an awful, horrible, gut wrenching thing that we had to decide.”
It was a decision that was not their own, even after all the options to save their daughter were exhausted.
“We asked every scenario every outcome anything we could do to make it OK, there was nothing we could do to make it OK,” she said.
Her husband Robb added that inducing labor, when they wanted, would not have prevented the inevitable. “We were going to hold her and watch her die and what was horrible was the terrible and agonizing wait that we had to go through before that happened which was unnecessary,” he said. It’s now the same situation they’re trying to prevent other families from having to face.
“They make these laws and paint with a very large brush and people fall into these gray areas because it’s not as black and white,” said Danielle of Nebraska’s 20-week abortion ban.
One can only have sympathy for the Deavers: both for their terrible loss and for the additional agony they were put through. As for the politicians who drew up that law in the way they did, well…
This is certainly a tragic situation.
But so were the tens of thousands of unnecessary late term abortions performed by butchers like the infamous Gosnell.
One need not be religious (I am not even slightly religious) to condemn the murder of unborn children.
Nebraska’s blanket prohibition of abortion after 20 weeks may be too broad. But just about every law to restrict late-term abortions to cases of medical necessity has been loopholed with “health of the woman” exceptions that include “mental health”, and essentially negate the law.
Cases like this are heartbreaking, but we as a society need to man up and make a decision. In cases like this, where the baby will die either in the womb, or soon after it is born, we need to be consistent. Either it should be legal to euthanise such babies before or after they are born, or it should be illegal in both cases. I simply don’t see why it should be legal to kill it while you can’t see it, but as soon as it’s visible, you can’t.
I guess I am missing something. Was she immobile. Couldn’t she have just gone to Minnesota or Wisconsin to get the abortion?