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When A Birth Is Also A Death

Sometimes in mortality, (since I have an irrevocable living testimony / experience that there IS AN AFTERlife.....(I can see and hear them in joyous family gettogethers)....sometimes there are lessons and experiences and tests we CAN ONLY LEARN from our hearts being wrenched, torn and broken.....ONLY from that deep hurting....ONLY from being pushed to our limit of faith and belief.
God, and I KNOW HE exists and loves us, has only divine and loving reasons for those experiences to exist. When we TRUST Him and accept His will....LETTING GO....Letting God....the parts of us that need refining and changing can do it's work.
We WILL be with our families again. Please believe.
Love to everyone whose heart is aching. Your children live and wait for you in the Spirit World.
All you are going through, or have done in the past
is for a glorious blessed purpose. TRUST God please.

What a wonderful story!

AND I THOUGHT THAT I HAD PROBLEMS!

My heart goes out to these parents, and to the babies. God bless each and every one of you.

I am the parent of a child with Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome (HLHS), a condition mentioned in this article.

I would like to make it clear that HLHS can be treated and is not always "incompatible with life."

My son has had two of three surgeries that were developed over the past 25 years by Dr William Norwood and his colleagues in Boston and Philadelphia.

My son is 8 months old and doing great. He will always have to be monitored by a cardiologist and might eventually be a candidate for a donor heart, but there are hundreds of children with HLHS who have been successfully treated. One of the older treated HLHS survivors is in her mid 20s and studying at college.

Any doctor or journalist claiming that HLHS is incompatible with life is not up to date.

Within the past ten years, some medical materials still claim that it is a fatal condition but this is inaccurate.

Some parents still choose compassionate care for a number of reasons, but lack of possible treatment should not be one of the reasons.

It is easy to look up HLHS online and a number of resources exist including hopeforHLHS dot com.

This was indeed an uplifting and inspiring story. Thank you so much for sharing it.

What a wonderful outlook on what life really is. Although very hard and heartbreaking, adding those memories to your family is a great way to celebrate what that life is. I wonder if maybe making a scrapbook of all of the memories will keep it in their hearts and pass it on to future generations?
Kudos to Angel Watch for the wonderful work they are doing.

What a beautiful thing these ladies are doing. Fourteen years ago in a SLC OB office I heard the word anencephaly. I thought my world had just ended. Still in shock with no time to think we were walked over to the hospital where I agreed and was immediately hooked up to have labor induced. About 10 housr into the labor I said "What are we doing, oh my Lord, what have we done". I will never forgive the Dr. who walked me through that process while I was still in shock. I would urge everyone faced with this decision to wait ontil the shock wears off a bit to make this life changing decision. I would give anything to be able to go back and do it over. If I could only hold my baby for a few moments before he died I believe my grieving would have been easier and I wouldn't have anyone to forgive, not even myself. To this family who spent their time bonding with their baby what a beautiful memory you have created for yourselves and your other children.

Thanks to these two merciful women. The memory of my horrible experience in my full-term stillbirth 28 years ago is still clear when the "whisk baby away" policy was enforced. Nurses showed little compassion during the laboring process, knowing I was delivering a dead baby. Hospital "rules" wouldn't even allow my mother there - never mind that we both had to grieve and my husband couldn't support me in his emotional state. Nurses were annoyed at having to deal with the "dead baby" I had 15 minutes before "got to take baby to morgue." Moments later the clerk called on the intercom, "have you chosen a mortuary yet?" Mortuary? I was still crying. The next day I was aroused by an aide at 5:00 AM to get ready to feed the baby (big oops, no apology).

No photos or commemorative birth certificate for fear that the baby's footprints might one day lead to fraud (a baby we might try to claim on income tax or something else). They cut a corner off the cardstock paper normally used for this , printed the baby's foot and handed it to me - sum total of evidence it actually happened.

I certainly respect the intentions here, but it still worries me that these parents and consultants might be causing innocent babies severe and prolonged pain. If these babies are doomed by some catastrophic problem, shouldn't people use a little judgment? Is it merciful to allow a child in or out of the womb to suffer horrendously so the parents can do a little bonding? I'm skittish about euthanasia, too, so I'm not sure what to think about this. It just worries me.

Hypoplastic Left Heart can be treated and has been for over twenty years.

A wonderful story about a difficult situation. It mirrors what I tried to do over the many years as an obstetrician. Those few minutes or hours with a baby that cannot survive are priceless memories - memories that are denied to parents when the baby is whisked away for futile "treatment" in the NICU when there is no chance for survival. Even with severe deformity, the ultrasound enabled me to prepare the parents and I always focused on positive things such as a hand or foot, the tiny body, etc.

I occasionally had to firmly restrain a pediatrician or nursery nurse who was insistent that "protocol" demanded that the infant be taken to the nursery. In these cases, I always gently placed the baby in the arms of the parents for those irreplaceable moments, and then ushered the well-meaning but misguided nursery personnel from the room to have our "discussion" out of earshot of the parents. Without exception, every parent was grateful for the technology that made the diagnosis and time to prepare possible, and for the opportunity to have their time with their child without intrusive and useless interference by "the system".

When I saw the title of the article, I opened it up and started reading, thinking "I've got to send this to Gifford and Marci!" Then I noticed that Gifford and Marci are in the article. Bless your hearts, you two!

I am Gifford's sister, and I have also had a baby boy born 18 years ago without kidneys, a condition still "incompatible with life". I am one of the unfortunate mothers whose newborn was rushed off to the NICU, so I never really got to see him or touch and hold him while he was alive for 16 hours. I think that what Angel Watch is doing is fantastic; I know it meant a lot to Gifford and Marci.

As far as the poster above who worries about pain infants might experience, I know in the case of lack of or cystic kidneys, the infant experiences no pain whatsoever; the womb is just as warm and loving (albeit a little tight) as it is for every baby. The baby's death once he/she is born is very peaceful.

God bless all of you who are in this situation; remember that whatever choice you make regarding your infant will be the right one. A wise bishop told Gifford and Marci to make their choice and never look back.

I've always heard abortion opponents say that fetuses feel pain. So now they don't? Which is it? Is it worth it to those parents to prolong the child's agony just so they can get a footprint on paper? Is the nightmare pain of anencephaly OK as long as you're in the "warm and loving" womb?

It is obvious that "to sister" has never actually had this experience. One of the first things that the doctor tells you when they break the bad news to you is that your infant is not experiencing any pain.

The LDS church officially allows abortions when "the fetus is known by competent medical authority to have serious defects that will not allow the baby to survive beyond birth." (Ensign Nov. 1998 pg 71.) Abortions in such cases kills an innocent child before it's time. purposely killing such a child because it may feel pain or because it is going to die anyway is the primary reasoning of all euthanists. Christians however support the right to life amendment which inists that children in such cases must not be purposely killed. Instead, they should be given every chance to live as long as they can live. Even in the Case of Risk to the Mothers life the child can be removed to save the mother but it cannot be purposely killed in the process and is given every chance to live. Abortions (purposely killing the child)in these cases is only done to ensure that the child does not live which of course violates Christ's teaching to love them as we love ourselves and inasmuch as we have done it unto one of the least of these we have done it unto Christ.

Your lead is confusing.

Which is it? I really want to know? One of the big anti-abortion arguments is that "the fetus feels no pain." Pro-life people are always saying that the fetus is capable of feeling pain. Well . . . what's the real story?

To Catholic........i dont think the purpose of this article was to make people start attacking other religions. When we believe what has been revealed to us by prophets of God, we CHOOSE to believe,and we can also choose not to believe it.How about we all make an effort to ask God about the matter...because if we ask in sincerity,He will answer.
Its different when you are the one experiencing such a trial and when you have never experienced it.
As painful as it is,we would do well to seek and accept Gods will,and he loves these children(they are His before they are conceived in us).
Let us be supportive rather then critical and insensitive to the feelings of others.

A very dear friend of mine was told over and over and over to terminate her pregnacy, incompatable of life. Now he is 2 and the medical community was totally wrong.
*Now they aren't always wrong. The "trisomies" they can confirm. There are other birth defects that are abosolute. I think it is a very beautiful, t sacred experience to bring a child even for just a moment into this life.
*However, shame on those flinging the anti abortion stuff too. For some famlies it is not something they feel they can cope with, to go full term with a child that is incomptable with life. Just because the prognosis is that the child will live for a few hours, but they choose to abort doesn't mean that it's our job to tell them they have sinned. It is between, them, and the lord (and for the LDS families there bishop also). Period