pregnancy and congenital defects

Dificult and somewhat painfull question. I have a genetic disorder called Marfan's, which affects your connective tissue such as legiments, tendons, skeleton, heart-valves and so forth. I have a 50% chance of passing it on if I ever have any kids. At this point, my feeling is that when married, my decision to have children would rely on my wife's opinion on wether she is willing to care for such a child. I feel that I don't want to put a child through what I have gone through but even so, I would love to have kids of my own one day. None of us are born perfect and some just have more obvious problems that requires more care than others. God has a reason for every child that gets born...no matter their health. In the situation where you know that your child might be born with difficulties, it's easier to decide wether you do or do not want to have children before falling pregnant. I will however never allow my wife to have an abortion just because the child is "less perfect". You could say that I am anti-abortion. I would happily accept the responsibilities of taking care of my child, no matter what their requirements. That is after all what you promise, the moment you conceive...to uphold your responsibilities towards the life you had just created...

It would be hard to bring a baby that you knew would have defects into the world knowing how hard it would be not only for the parents but for the child as well. I do however think that the good lord has lessons to be learned by giving us children be they healthy or be they born with disabilities. Through my children I have grown and learned so much. I really do not think I could do selective abortion. But I also can not judge others who might choose that option.

i was never in that situation when i was pregnant, thank god. i would have to consider the kind of life a child would have if i was told that they had something bad wrong w/them .

This is a difficult and very personal question for me, and most others. But i have had some experience with it in my life actually. My first son was born after a completely normal pregnancy and had a very difficult birth and suffered brain damage due to lack of oxygen. I am literally sitting next to him in the hospital right now (4 years later) after he just had a surgery on his spinal cord to try and alleviate some of the tone in his legs from the Cerebral Palsy. But my story isn't over there. About a year after Noah was born my wife found out she was pregnant again. This child however had a whole truck load of problems. Trisomy 13, and a pretty severe case of it. He was developing with about half of his brain, a missing chamber in his heart, calcified kidneys and a few organs actually forming outside of his body. not to mention the clubbed feet and malformed head. After two agonizing weeks we decided that aborting would be best, not for us, but for him. No surgeon would touch him after birth (if he made it that far) and he would die of heart failure, starvation, or dehydration hours, if not minutes after birth. It came down to the fact that it would be more selfish of me to make him endure that just so i could have a few moments with him than to let him go. This was not an easy decision, and this is the first time i have ever really wrote about this. I had my doubts back then, but today I am sure that we made the right decision. Nobody ever brings this situation up in the debate over these matters. We DESPERATELY wanted this child, but in the end the best decision was to just let him go. We lost a child that day, we didn't choose to "get rid of him". It was just the only decent choice we had at the end of the day. so...that is a very long winded explanation of my views on the matter. As the father of a special needs child, i understand both sides. I would die for my son who has pretty severe disabilities, but there still is a line where a child would be better off just as there is for a terminal adult.