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Ending a pregnancy for fetal abnormalityArrow
3-4 years since pregnancy ended
Interview 16  

Interview 16

Age at Interview: 37
Sex: Female
Background: Pregnancy ended in 2002. No of children at interview: 4 + [2- 1 TOP, 1 stillbirth]. Ages of other children 20, 18, 15 + baby. Occupations: mother & housewife, Father- retail industry. Marital status: married. Ethnic background: White British.
Brief outline:Her 4th pregnancy: experienced sickness during first trimester and felt unwell. Blood test at 16 weeks detected Down's syndrome. Amniocentesis confirmed Down's. Pregnancy ended by induction at 19 weeks. Following the termination she had a stillbirth. (In 2005 she had another baby.)


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She realised she needed counselling after about 3 months when she was spending hours sitting by her son's grave.

 



So the guilt's always there, and the emotions of losing the boys I deal with better than the guilt. I can just put that down to the fact that they weren't supposed to be here, there's a reason they're not here anymore. Whether there's a God or not, if there is God, he chose to have the boys with him. And at some point we'll be together. And certainly in the last, the 3 months after the second baby died, I prayed to be with them, to such a point my husband drastically worried about me, I would sit in the graveyard for hours, and if I died at the graveyard I would have been happy. But that was just the need to be with the boys - so that's when I realised I needed to go into therapy and discuss it with somebody. 

Hmm. And that's helped?

Most definitely yeah. Independent therapy -it wasn't anything to do with NHS or my doctor - it was an independent therapist in [island]. He's just someone who's moved up quite recently and I just picked him out of the newspaper. He had an advert in the newspaper, and I phoned him up and said, “Can I come and speak to you?” At that point it was more to do with my husband and I having problems, but we were having problems because we hadn't dealt with the boys' death. 

We hadn't, I thought our marriage was in turmoil, but it was actually the fact that we'd both lost the boys, and not spoken about it, not dealt with it, just filed it away as if its you've just bought a new car, get rid of the old one. So 6 months later I think we're on an even keel again and ready for the next step. 
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