Moral polar opposite of abortion

The Anchoress (via Locusts and Honey) tells the stories of two mothers with cancer who declined treatment in order to give birth to healthy babies:

Today I read two such stories, one here:

HONOLULU — The family of Sharnell Onaga has announced she died on Tuesday night. Onaga found out she had leukemia when she became pregnant. She decided to have the child, and refused to undergo chemotherapy.

Onaga had two children and discovered she had leukemia when she was nine weeks pregnant with her third…She gave birth on Dec. 4. “Sarah is 4 months old and just doing wonderfully. She’s in perfect health and obviously a very special baby,” Onaga family friend Cissy Boyer said. Onaga hoped for a cord blood transplant, but developed an infection.

and here.

NASHVILLE, – On Thursday, February 15, at the age of 31, Jennifer Ann Carlisle gave up her life to cancer after refusing an abortion that doctors told her might have extended her life.

Jennifer had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005. At two months gestation, long before any chance of saving the child’s life outside the womb, Jennifer was told that she would die from the soccer ball-sized tumour if she did not abort the baby.

“Even though the doctors did say it would extend her life to have the abortion, she and her husband made the decision to let God choose,” said Carol Day, Jennifer’s mother. “They decided God would make that decision, not her,” Jennifer’s aunt, Jackie Murdock, told the Niles Daily Star. “She wouldn’t decide somebody else’s life.”

[…]

Gabriel Carlisle was born in January 2006 and Jennifer underwent aggressive chemotherapy but after a brief summer remission, her condition worsened. She attended church services Sunday February 11, and died the following week.

Two remarkable women whose example of selflessness, and whose ability to look beyond the “here-and-now” will be influencing their families for a long time. I’m sure not everyone reading this will find their decisions “admirable,” but I am humbled by them. And I am gratified by their reminder that all of us - loved into purposeful being by a Creator full of Intention, have our lives to live, for as long as we may.

I wrote way back when:

Although the reflexively Pro-life might consider this sort of sacrifice a no-brainer, I am always awe-struck when I read of this sort of woman. Not because I think she is a rarity, but because I think most mothers understand what [these women] did, even though many - particularly men who imagine themselves with a child and no wife - might question the “sense” of it. How can a woman with a family let herself die, and leave them without her help, her love, her guidance, her nurturing?

But many mothers know what it is like to stand at the bedside of a child whose lungs sound like rattletrap jalopies and pray, “let me have this illness, instead, please heal my baby…”

[…]

I do not mean to imply that fathers are incapable of making this same prayer, only that in the case of women I do believe it’s a prayer that comes to us very quickly and instinctively.

[…]

There is the endless debate: what is “worth” more, and therefore more important: a helpless baby or a helpmeet wife? It’s an awful choice, but one that must sometimes be made. Does a woman look at her husband and her other children and say, “let me destroy this one, because I cannot bear to leave these others - how will they go on without me…” thus making a choice that no one could compassionately gainsay (who among us would want to be in that untenable position) and choosing abortion and treatment for her illness? Or does she say, “I know the love that came into the world through my marriage, and through these children, and the treatment may not save me, anyway…and I cannot get in the way of the coming of more love…” and sacrifice herself?

I suppose to do this takes a servile mindset - a mindset that says, “maybe this is all the life I am supposed to have, maybe this is all the time God intended for me, and so I will obediently make room for this new life, because I trust Him…” That is a mindset that is profoundly misunderstood in this era. It is a mindset thought foolish and unsophisticated and wrong, by many.

Really, I guess what it it comes down to is faith, and trust that in sacrificing oneself, one is not leaving the rest un-tended to, un-nurtured, un-watched. It comes down to the great Mystery that we are all invited to explore, if we are only open to it. And the key to the Mystery is Love.

For some reason, all of this makes me think of the Parable of the Two Sons: Jesus asked, “What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today. The son said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterwards he changed his mind and went. The man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did his father’s will?” They answered, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”

[Some women who make this choice might be] staunch secularist[s] who - urged and instructed by Love - hooked into the Mystery and made [their] choice. But in doing so, [they have] also hooked into the message of the Christ: Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for another. Does it matter whether or not [such a mother] is Christian? Not really. What mattered [is being] open to Love, in its coming and it its going.