Former Secretary of State and Senator Hillary Clinton advocated for discrimination-based abortions in a tweet on May 15, throwing her support behind the abortion of a preborn girl with Turner syndrome.
“An Idaho mother faced two options: Continue a pregnancy likely to end in miscarriage or stillbirth, with risks to her own health, or travel out of state for an abortion,” tweeted Clinton. “These stories are playing out all over the country.”
Clinton ended her tweet by linking to an article in the Idaho Capital Sun lamenting Idaho’s pro-life law protecting most preborn children from abortion, which prohibited the killing of the preborn daughter of Jennifer Adkins. At 12 weeks, Adkins learned her daughter “likely had Turner syndrome, a chromosomal abnormality that ends in miscarriage in 99% of cases,” according to the article. It only affects girls, and for those who do survive, there is a risk of health issues.
It is unclear if Adkins underwent definitive testing, as early prenatal screening only provides the level of risk that a child has a certain health condition, not a positive or negative result.
Adkins said that due to her daughter’s diagnosis, she herself was at risk of developing mirror syndrome, which would cause the mother to experience similar symptoms to her preborn child. Dr. Maria Palmquist, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise, Idaho, told States Newsroom that this could lead to preeclampsia. Adkins wanted to have an abortion, but Idaho law doesn’t allow abortion due to a fetal diagnosis.
It’s important to note that Adkins had not developed a life-threatening condition, but if she had developed preeclampsia, there would have been treatments to help. If those treatments were unsuccessful, doctors would have delivered her daughter prematurely — which is not an induced abortion meant to deliberately kill a child. In an emergency delivery, they could have tried to save both lives. There was no immediate medical need for Adkins’s pregnancy to end and there was never a need to intentionally and directly kill her preborn daughter through induced abortion.
“It’s hard knowing that my body and the fetus are trying so hard to hang on,” Adkins said. “And we had to make a really hard decision. Do we try? But for what purpose? There’s no sense in bringing a child into this world that’s not going to survive anyway or have severe complications. And it’s not fair to any of us.”
The editor-in-chief of The Federalist, Mollie Hemingway, responded to Clinton’s tweet with an essay by Caitlin Bawn, a woman who lives with Turner syndrome and worries that prenatal testing like that Adkins underwent is causing parents to make “irreversible decisions without understanding the disorder.”
Hillary Clinton here argues for the killing of babies with Turner Syndrome. She should meet the author of this piece, who has Turner Syndrome. https://t.co/NsXNkXPWPk https://t.co/GjPKY5Oybp
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) May 15, 2023
Research shows that about 76% of preborn girls diagnosed with Turner syndrome are aborted. However, said Bawn, “Like Down syndrome or autism, Turner is a spectrum disorder with symptoms that range in severity, and a diagnosis is no indication of what an individual’s life will be. A girl who has it — like me — can be happy, intelligent, and highly successful.”
Bawn wasn’t diagnosed until she was four and says she “was a pretty normal child.”
“But just search for ‘Turner syndrome’ on Google, and you’ll find possible symptoms that would make any pregnant woman pause. Infertility. Webbed neck. Kidney failure. Learning disability. Skeletal abnormalities,” she said.
After Bawn’s diagnosis, her mother, who has a PhD in biology, heard the list of “18 to 20 scary things” that her daughter could go through. But instead of focusing on the negative, she decided to consider the positive — what would her daughter be “good at.”
“Over the years that followed, we were able to cross most things off the list of dread, and the symptoms that remain have had minimal impact on my life,” said Bawn.
She said she finds her symptoms “frustrating rather than devastating, and my life has been much more normal than the horror stories many pregnant women hear when they are told their fetus may have TS. This syndrome is not my identity.”
Bawn has also lived a life full of accomplishments. At 18 she won the Prime Minister’s Global Fellowship. She helped set up a cancer hospital in rural Kolkata. She earned a master’s degree in international relations and a second master’s in journalism.
“I set this down to highlight a life that many would not think possible of someone with a genetic disorder,” she wrote. “It saddens me that expectant mothers do not see my life as an option for their unborn daughters when TS is diagnosed. If they are only told of everything that may go wrong, they naturally conjure up the worst-case scenario.”
She continued, “I don’t in any way mean to diminish the complications of TS. For some girls, it’s debilitating. I may be lucky to be at the milder end of it, but I am equally representative of what life with the disorder can be.”
Bawn admits she supports abortion, but says she is “nauseated by the thought that a mother could terminate her TS daughter…” She thinks doctors should give a “fair and accurate” picture of life with Turner syndrome that include stories like hers.
