The defiant ones: mothers tell of battles to give birth

This article in today's Sydney Morning Herald describes the pressure to have abortions.

JULIA ANDERSON'S voice caught with emotion as she sought to explain the impact of having a baby with Down syndrome.

Twice her husband, John, the former deputy prime minister, took over her role at the launch of a book denouncing the routine practice of terminating abnormal foetuses.

The Andersons didn't consider abortion when they learned their baby would suffer Down syndrome. But pressures on his family triggered by baby Andrew's severe internal abnormalities led Mr Anderson, then a cabinet minister, to raise with the Prime Minister the possibility of leaving politics in 1998.

"Who was I to place a greater value on my life than on his?" Mr Anderson said of Andrew, who lived for six months.

The Andersons spoke at the launch yesterday of Defiant Birth - Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics, a book by Melinda Tankard Reist containing the stories of 19 women who have fought the abortion of foetuses who prenatal testing has found are likely to be abnormal.

Mrs Anderson began by saying that she had not realised when she had Andrew that she was having "a defiant birth" and that 85 to 90 per cent of foetuses thought to have Down syndrome were terminated in Australia.

"I found out afterwards that we were going against the norm."

As she began to explain the importance of Andrew's life, emotion halted her words and her husband took over.

Andrew's importance, said Mr Anderson, was not necessarily the impact he had on the family but of his being able to live his life, even though he had to struggle with the pain of numerous operations needed to correct severe problems with his internal organs.

"It was not our life to take away or cut short … every person is valuable and not just a commodity to be used or rejected according to our whims," Mr Anderson said.

"One day it is Down syndrome. What if it is potential kleptomaniacs next?"

Ms Tankard Reist, an anti-abortion campaigner and former staffer of Tasmanian independent former senator Brian Harradine, said the forces to rid the world of individuals on the grounds of disabilities and imperfections were already widespread.

Strangers asked parents of disabled children why they had not had a prenatal test, patients were pressured against going ahead with births, with one doctor reportedly telling an expectant mother that her child "will only

be a pet". She said the women in her book had confronted the impersonal "quality control" of current practice.