Woman Refuses Abortion to Save Life: Both Child and Mother Doing Fine

How about some good news for a change?  In the UK, a woman named Lyndsey Crowder was diagnosed with cancer while pregnant. She decided to risk risk her own life to bring her baby into the world. Four years later, both are doing fine.  From the Daily Mail story:

A women with cancer who refused to terminate her unborn child for the sake of her own health is finally enjoying life with a healthy little girl and has battled the disease. Lyndsey Crowder was delighted when she fell pregnant again after previously losing three babies but weeks later she was diagnosed Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and was told by doctors she possibly had just weeks to live. Doctors gave her three options including terminating her baby for the sake of her own health or taking a huge risk and starting life-saving treatment.

Mrs Crowder, a 34-year-old dispatcher for the North West Ambulance service and who lives in Walton, Merseyside, said: ‘To my mind there was no choice. But I knew I had to give the baby a chance.’ The doctors explained it was unclear  what effect chemotherapy could have on her unborn child or how significant a strain a pregnancy could be on her already weakened body. With a tumour the size of a small football in her chest Mrs Crowder began eight rounds of gruelling chemotherapy. She said: ‘I had scan after scan to check on the baby and even though everything looked fine it wasn’t until she was  born and I saw her that I could believe she’d be okay’. Remarkably Sidney Rose, now four, was safely delivered by c-section at 34 weeks.

I don’t think hers was the morally mandated decision, but it sure seems to have been the right one.  Maternal love, you just can’t beat it.  And I would think that if things had gone the other way.