Greg DalyA Cavan couple’s fifth child proved to be anything but ‘incompatible with life’, Greg Daly learns
Taking the stage with his youngest daughter at the Pro Life Campaign’s recent 33 to 1 rally in Dublin was something Bailieborough’s Martin McBreen had never imagined himself doing.
Insistent that he’s not a sort who, listening to the radio, would say “oh, there’s Joe Duffy, I’ll give my sixpence”, Martin says the overwhelming media support for Clare Daly’s legislative proposals to permit the abortion of babies with life-limiting conditions pushed him into the spotlight.
“We’ve been given a wee miracle here,” he says of his daughter Grace, who doctors said would not live to be born, “and we’re hearing all the reasons being told out there that we’d be doing such a service for women to put this into legislation, and I’m ‘Look, now hang on a second. If we’d have followed down that route we wouldn’t have Grace here today’.”
Martin’s wife Sinead explains that all it was only after three months of pregnancy that scans showed her baby was full of fluid, a form of hydrops that had bloated her such that the doctors likened her appearance to the Michelin Man and told the McBreens that she ought not to have survived even as long as she had done.
Further tests showed that the child had Down’s syndrome, but would not live to be born. “They said the baby’s not going to survive anyway because it’s full of fluid, the heart will stop,” says Sinead. “They diagnosed the baby even before we got the results back as being a fatal fetal abnormality.”
Having already advised the couple to end the pregnancy at a sister hospital in Britain, they kept up a constant litany, says Sinead: “Why would you continue with the pregnancy? Everyone does this, don’t feel bad, everyone’s doing this, it’s not an abortion, it’s medical management where we look after this type of thing all the time.”
Two or three days later, the McBreens were informed that their baby’s hydrops was, indeed, a fatal fetal abnormality and it was a matter of days or at most weeks until she died. Advised to prepare themselves for the inevitable, they were told that the child’s heart would not survive the strain and that she would be lucky to make it to 20 weeks.
Again, they were asked whether they would not consider termination, and why they were choosing a tougher path when an easier one was available. Sinead felt, she said, as though she was putting the staff out by continuing with what looked like a futile pregnancy, but the alternative was unthinkable to her.
The only option
“I couldn’t understand the rationale behind it, to abort a baby because she wasn’t going to survive,” she says. “I kept saying, and I remember the last time saying it, ‘Can we not just end this conversation for good? I’m not going down that road. I know what I’m facing isn’t nice, but to me it is the only option.’ I said, ‘God will decide what day, what hour, and what minute this baby is going to stop living, and only he can decide. I couldn’t – how can anybody? If she’s going to die anyway, well, let it be natural. Let her get every chance. I want to give the baby every chance.’”
Week after week they returned to the hospital, only to be told that nothing had happened and though the doctors couldn’t understand how their child was still alive, they shouldn’t get their hopes up. Eventually Sinead was advised against returning to work, and to expect the worst soon, but still nothing happened, even after she and Martin had followed the hospital’s advice and picked a cemetery plot for their unborn daughter.
Following a friend’s urging, she visited a lady who had a relic of Padre Pio though she was sceptical when the lady insisted that the baby would live. Her friend was praying for the child to miraculously survive, she said, whereas she felt that if there could be any miracle it would be that perhaps God would take the child sooner rather than later, and that she wouldn’t suffer.
When Sinead was about 30 weeks pregnant, they borrowed a cross that had belonged to the saint, and during the week they held the relic a few people visited the house for blessings. The night before her weekly scan – while the cross was in the house – Sinead said she had a “weird dream that Padre Pio was holding a baby. And I woke up the next morning and said, ‘She’s gone. He’s taken her.’”
They went to hospital, expecting to be told that their child had died, but instead looking at the scan the obstetrician said, “Oh my God. The fluid’s all gone.” Talking into his hands he continued, “I don’t know what to say. If this was the first scan, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything wrong.”
Insisting that things could change, the hospital maintained the McBreens shouldn’t get their hopes up given how the baby had a fatal heart problem. Sinead, though, was confident. “From that day on, I knew in my heart and soul that Grace would be born,” she says. “I knew she’d be fine.”
Eventually they went in to have their child, with the medical team pointing out that they didn’t know how she had got so far and that things might yet go very badly wrong, but on November 12 last Grace was born, with Down’s syndrome as predicted, but perfectly healthy.
“At no stage could you say that any of the medical people didn’t do their job,” Martin says. “As far as I’m concerned, the doctors and nurses saw what they were seeing – it’s just that the results turned out different to what they would have thought.”
As for those who would claim that Grace obviously didn’t have a ‘real’ fatal fetal abnormality, that she wasn’t truly ‘incompatible with life’, Sinead is dismissive. “We were told to go and get a plot for Grace. We were told that she was not going to survive,” she says, stressing that she was told that people get such diagnoses all the time, and that the best thing was to “go to England”, deal with it, and move on.
Theirs is a story that needs to be told, feels Martin, because other families will find themselves in similar positions, and will make decisions based on what they hear. His attempts to spread the story through the secular media have met with no success, but he hasn’t given up.
Difference
Stories like Grace’s stick in the memory, he says, “and at some stage it could be the difference between somebody being given a chance or not. It could sink in, and the ‘middle ground’ people need more stories to justify why we think this way, and this is one of those stories.”
He describes a man who approached him after he spoke at the 33 to 1 rally, saying that such stories helped reinforce his belief that that we have to give every life a chance.
“I think that’s the way I would like our society to be,” adds Martin, “that everyone gets a fair chance. If you try and get more people thinking that life is important, and that every single one is unique and that’s the only chance they’re ever going to get at life, I think the more people kind of keep that their philosophy the better our country will be.”