Out of England comes a miraculous story of a courageous mother, 41-year-old Jo Powell, who discovered a lump on her breast days after finding out she was pregnant with first child. Powell refused to start treatment until later in her pregnancy so she would not harm or kill her unborn child.
In similar cases, doctors suggest an abortion, but, as studies show, there is no need for women to destroy the life of their unborn child to save their own.
The London Daily mail has this touching story:
However, LifeNews, in April covered a collection of stories from The Lancet, a prominent British medical journal, showing pregnant women don’t need to have an abortion in order to get treatment for cancer. The information shows chemo treatment does not harm the unborn baby and mothers can treat themselves for cancer without worrying about effects on the unborn child.It is a decision no expectant mother should have to face. After years of trying for a baby, Jo Powell finally discovered that she was pregnant.
But her delight turned to despair days later when doctors found she had breast cancer and advised her to sacrifice her unborn child’s life in order to save her own by beginning chemotherapy.
Mrs Powell defied the doctors, however, and refused to start the treatment until much later in her pregnancy, in a gamble that could have cost her her life. Miraculously, she and her husband Richard are now celebrating with their young son, Jake, after being told that she has beaten the cancer.
Mrs Powell, 41, an office administrator, said yesterday: ‘When I heard the word cancer my first thought was, “I’m going to lose my baby.”
“It was like I was in a living nightmare. We had been trying for a baby for years, and we were convinced it wasn’t going to happen for us, so Jake was so special. I knew we couldn’t give up on our baby. There was no way I was going to sacrifice him to save myself.”
“I knew that even if I didn’t make it, I would have brought a life into the world.”
Mrs Powell was told that if she chose to keep her unborn child she would have to delay chemotherapy until later in her pregnancy when her baby would be strong enough to survive it. The doctors advised her to consider an abortion, explaining that her cancer was aggravated by her hormones and that the pregnancy could help the disease grow faster.
In 2009, LifeNews.com reported on a new studyshowing doctors don’t need to suggest an abortion to pregnant women who want cancer treatment. The study involved a concept called pregnancy associated breast cancer — breast cancer that is diagnosed when a woman is pregnant or within a year after delivery.
The mainstream media highlighted the study as if it showed a new concept, somehow finally dismissing the notion that pregnant women undergoing breast cancer treatment should have an abortion. But Dr. Joel Brind, a Baruch College professor says studies have shown that for decades.
“Actually, this finding has been reported many times in the last 15 years,” Brind explained.
“Unfortunately, many doctors still recommend abortion for women diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant, so that they can treat the cancer more aggressively. This is despite worldwide research going back as far as the 1930’s that shows that so-called ‘therapeutic abortion’ substantially shortens lifespan, whereas carrying the pregnancy to term makes long-term cure more likely,” he said.
Brind says that a 1976 review of all studies published to that point, conducted by French doctor P. Juret, reported that, “The futility of therapeutic abortion is now certain.”
Although the study isn’t the revelation the mainstream media claimed, Brind says it is quite useful.
“What the new story out of MD Anderson shows is that women in this particular situation — which are only about 3% of all breast cancers — have no worse a prognosis than women with the same stage of breast cancer who are not pregnant,” he said.
“But what is most important about the current report is the absence of any data about abortion, i.e., a difference in prognosis as a function of whether or not the pregnant patient aborts the baby,” he explained. “To their credit, doctors at MD Anderson have, for at least the last several years, been very good at treating both patients: Mom and her unborn child.”
“Hopefully, the current report will be yet another nail in the coffin of ‘therapeutic abortion,’” he told LifeNews.com.
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