One of Britain’s top columnists and a bestselling novelist (My Life on a Plate, 2000 and Don’t You Want Me, 2002) Knight went to Cambridge University where she read English. In her early twenties she had two young sons. She worked for The Times, the Mail on Sunday, Today and the Observer before becoming a columnist on the Sunday Times.
This moving article tracks the dilemmas of her third pregnancy. Her daughter, Nell, was born with a heart defect and a chromosomal disorder which might have been picked up if she had had an amniocentesis. The piece produced much debate.
Unfortunately, I am not particularly pro-choice. Abortion is a subject I normally button my lip about: saying that you are pro-life is considered illiberal and anti-feminist. So I keep quiet about the fact that I believe with all my heart (and what passes for my brain) that life starts at the moment of conception.
This seems to me to be simple biological truth. A dead baby is a dead baby, whether it is a 6-week- or 20-week-old ‘foetus’. I understand and accept that this may be a minority view, though nothing will persuade me to believe that the majority of people feel it is in any way right to kill, as is currently legal, a 24-week-old unborn baby – one that sucks its thumb, kicks its legs, smiles to itself, hiccups.
I feel so strongly and categorically about the subject that piping up only leads to the more unpleasant kind of arguments. Religious persuasion is usually invoked (I am a semi-lapsed Catholic who uses contraception, but I would be pro-life, I think, regardless of faith or the lack of it). However, after Channel 4’s My Foetus programme last week, which showed a doctor performing a vacuum-pump termination, I want to say my piece.
Eleven weeks ago I gave birth to a lovely little daughter. On Wednesday morning she will be having open-heart surgery to correct a congenital condition called truncus arteriosus, aka common arterial trunk: her pulmonary artery and aorta are conjoined. Being told, as we were when Nell was one day old, that your baby has a serious and life-threatening heart defect is an experience so brutally devastating that I cannot describe it.
Nell has common arterial trunk because of a chromosomal malfunction called 22q deletion – bits of genetic material have fallen off the 22nd chromosome. She could, in theory, be pretty badly handicapped: there are a possible 180 symptoms of the syndrome, including heart defects. So far, thank God, our beautiful girl has shown no sign of any of the really serious ones, aside from her heart condition – but since she’s only tiny, that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods by any stretch.
I am 38, and as a 38-year-old I was scanned repeatedly throughout my pregnancy. Everything was, as my obstetrician put it, ‘boringly normal’. Nell’s heart has four chambers and fully functioning valves – that’s all the scan can see. I had a nuchal fold test to determine the baby’s chances of having Down’s syndrome: it came back as a one in 1,600 chance. Pretty remote, so I didn’t have an amniocentesis – it seemed pointlessly invasive, given that I would not abort a child if it had Down’s. If I had had the test, though, it would have picked up the chromosomal abnormality – and since this is often indicative of heart defects, my boyfriend and I would perhaps have known about this too.
Imagine thinking you are carrying a healthy baby and being told that, actually, she may have 180 diverse handicaps and a life-threatening heart condition. What would you do? I like to think that I would have brushed off any suggestion of a termination. But I don’t know: it is possible that I would have performed a quick ideological U-turn and yelled, or sobbed, for the abortionist. Mercifully, this was never an option: we didn’t know anything was wrong.
The only point at which I waver in my unwavering stance on abortion is in the case of babies born so severely handicapped that, we imagine, their life will barely be ‘worth living’. Since having Nell, and joining e-mail groups and discussion boards, I have changed the greater part of my mind: what my boyfriend and I are going through is a picnic compared with what some families must endure. And their children are happy – I’ve looked at their photographs and seen them wearing party hats on their birthdays, or playing in the garden, beaming with joy. A beam of joy is a beam of joy, no matter how sick you are. Some of these children have severe learning difficulties, some have serious physical anomalies; one or two are so ill that it hurts your heart to look at them.
But they all have one thing in common: they are alive, and enjoying their lives and, above all, they are all loved.
Who are we to say what does or does not constitute a life ‘worth living’? Should all these children have been sucked out and ended up in some hospital bin? And what do you do if your perfect child is horribly burnt or is involved in a hideous car crash when she is 10 years old? Do you quietly dig a hole in the garden because, suddenly, her life is no longer ‘worth living’ either?
When I was in my late teens and early twenties and militantly prochoice about a woman’s ‘right to choose,’ having an abortion was in some quarters seen as a badge of, if not quite honour, then a commendable, almost sexy kind of feminist bad girlhood.
As a reasonably bad girl myself, I remember feeling left out – how puerile that seems now – because I managed to have sex and not get pregnant. My friends referred to their terminations as ‘abos’, thought of themselves as rather rock’n’roll, and liked airing the old chestnut that terminating their baby’s life was as easy as having a tooth out.
It has been my unhappy experience to escort two women to an abortion clinic in London, friendship being stronger than moral conviction. One fainted straight afterwards; the other cried before, during and after, and every day for the next six months.
I’ll never forget seeing the other half-dozen women in the waiting room waiting to go upstairs and have their baby removed and thrown away. In both my friends’ cases, the abortion was chosen because, well, you know, having a baby wasn’t terribly convenient at the time.
My daughter is the most wonderful thing to have happened to my boyfriend and me. She has fat little cheeks and huge blue eyes and tufts of black hair, and every time she smiles her gummy smile I am so overwhelmed that I just stand there grinning back and want to explode with love. It breaks my heart to think that there are people who abort children like her, and it breaks my heart to think that I may once have been one of them.
There is no point in sitting on the fence on this subject. Like everybody, I try to see that morality is personal, that everything is a matter of choice. But if you believe something is wrong for you and wrong in general then you might as well call what you hold true a moral principle.
Tony Blair once told the late Cardinal Winning that though he was personally opposed to abortion, he didn’t want to impose that view on others. Winning couldn’t believe his ears.
‘On what other policies do you apply such a logic?’ he asked. Winning thought Blair’s fence-sitting was shallow, and we might all be guilty of such fence-sitting when forced to address this most emotional of subjects.
But let me just tell you: our baby smiles at us and the sun comes out. She could have ended up as bits of human tissue in a bowl of water, like the baby terminated in My Foetus.
You might take the view that the thing in the bowl is merely a collection of cells – but surely every intelligent person knows in their heart that this is ethical flimflam. Do what you will with your pregnancy – I am not calling for the criminalisation of abortion – but have the moral courage to clearly understand what it is that you are doing.
I have spent my life listening to women voicing their right to choose, and I’ve supported them often in that choice. But I want to call for another right: the right to name the thing lying in the bowl. It is the same thing as the one lying downstairs in a cot. It is a baby.