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A story that I first heard 25 years ago is worth re-telling.
It was from Dr. J.A. MacDougall of St. John's, New Brunswick. It happened right after World War II before we had any effective treatment for tuberculosis.
Back in those days, when a person got active TB, we put them in a tuberculosis hospital and isolated them from the rest of the community, for they were contagious.
This story is about a 23-year-old woman. She was seriously ill with TB. Her husband had brought a mild case back home with him from the war and she had caught it.
She had literally no resistance and now was rapidly losing ground as the infection took its toll. The lower lobe of her right lung had an enlarging tuberculosis cavity in it.
She was weak and losing weight. The doctors had tried everything they knew and they had finally admitted that they were licked.
It was December. The doctor went in to tell her that medically there was no hope. The decision lay with God.
She asked just one thing: "If I'm still alive on Christmas Eve, I'd like your promise that I can go hom for Christmas." She had weighed 125 pounds, but was down to 87, and her fever ranged from 101 to 103. She looked terribly ill but always smiled.
The doctors had tried a new method of injecting aire into her abdominal cavity in an attempt to push her diaphragm up so as to collapse that part of the lung.
It was known then that if you
could collapse the lung so that the cavity was compressed and closed,
that sometimes nature would then take hold and the lung would begin to
heal.
The attempt to inject air, a so-called pneumoperitonium, nearly killed
her and they gave up for a bad try. With this, her last hope was gone,
and they had told her that she was going to die.
But Christmas came, and a promise had been made, so, with great
misgivings, they let her go home, instructing her to shield her mouth
and her breathing from her loved ones. She came back to the hospital
late Christmas Day. Every day there after her condition grew just a
little bit worse and yet she didn't die. To the doctors' continuing
amazement, she hung on. At the end of February, she was less than 80
pounds.
And then a new complication -- she became nauseated, even without food
in her stomach. And what did they discover? It was ridiculous, but she
had become pregnant when home on Christmas Day. But she was so ill, so
weak, she couldn't possibly have conceived -- her body wouldn't have
been up to it. But she was pregnant. The test was positive. There she
was on the very outer frontier of life herself, and she now held within
her body another life!
Legally, medically, an abortion could have been done back then, for it
certainly imperiled her life, but she and her husband were against it;
the doctors were against it. And, in this case, the abortion might well
have killed her. Besides, the doctors thought her body would reject the
baby.
But one week passed, and then another. Never once did the doctors doubt
that she was dying. But for some totally unexplained reason, she kept
living and she stayed pregnant. March became April, became May, and
became June. And then a totally unexpected and incredible thing
happened. Her temperature began to go down. For the first time, they
noted some slight improvement in her condition, and then a little more,
and a little more.
She began to eat. She gained a little weight, and then chest x-rays
showed that the enlargement of the cavity in her lung had stopped. More
than that, another x-ray showed why. Her diaphragm was being pushed up
against the lungs, collapsing the lower lobe. And who was doing the
pushing? The baby in her womb!
Nature was doing exactly what the doctors had been unable to do. It was
pressing the sides of the deadly hole together -- the baby was saving
his mother. The baby did save her, and at birth the baby was normal and
healthy. By then the tuberculosis cavity had closed and the mother was
markedly better. A few months later, she was sent home.
Dr. MacDougall, who told this story and cared for her, said, and let me
quote him: "That child didn't destroy his mother -- he saved her. Call
it the will of God, call it human love, call it the mystical quality of
motherhood, the turning in upon her to fight still more because she
still had more to fight for; call it what you will -- it happened. I
still wonder at what she did and at the unfathomable force it
signifies." [Life Issues Connector, July 2008]
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Abortion 
