Two tragic stories regarding the abortions of healthy babies following faulty prenatal testing are making headlines in the United Kingdom (UK). However, the real tragedy isn’t that healthy preborn babies died, but that any baby — regardless of their health status — dies by abortion.
‘Our daughter should be here’
According to the BBC, Carl Everson and Carly Wesson were expecting their first child, whom they nicknamed Ladybird. But a blood-screening test performed in early pregnancy — and known not to offer a clear diagnosis — indicated that their baby had an increased risk of having a chromosomal abnormality. The couple underwent a second, more precise test, called chorionic villus sampling (CVS), and two days later, doctors from City Hospital in Nottingham told the couple that the initial test result showed that their daughter had Patau’s Syndrome, which can cause miscarriage, stillbirth, or death shortly after birth. Also known as Trisomy 13, children who have the mosaic version —in which not all of the body’s cells have the extra copy of chromosome 13 — can survive, but will live with physical and intellectual disabilities.
The more detailed test results would not be in for two more weeks, but doctors advised an abortion.
“It’s the most impossible choice we’ve ever had to make. We thought the best option was to end the pregnancy because the baby was suffering,” said Wesson. “It’s just an awful, impossible situation. There was no good outcome, we had no hope.”
It’s an unfair choice to put parents in — either kill your baby to avoid any suffering or allow your baby to be born and potentially suffer. It’s a lose-lose situation in their minds, deeming it an “impossible choice,” when it shouldn’t be a choice at all.
Under the advice of doctors, Wesson underwent an abortion at 14 weeks. According to the Endowment for Human Development, at this age, Ladybird could touch her hands to her mouth, her taste buds were formed, and she could make complex facial expressions. Ladybird appears to have been delivered by induction, but at this age, the most common procedure used is a D&E abortion in which the abortionist dismembers the child before crushing her skull.
Six weeks after Ladybird was aborted, the couple received a call from the hospital asking them to come in. “[The consultant] just walked in, and the first thing she said was ‘I have got something to tell you, your results have changed,” Wesson said.
The full results from the CVS testing had come back, and Ladybird did not have Patau’s syndrome. By all accounts, she was completely healthy. The initial CVS test results were a false positive. When they asked if she would have survived, the doctor cruelly replied, “Well, you could have miscarried anyway.”
This comment is a clear representation of doctors treating preborn children as unworthy and of no value. Their lives are treated as meaningless, simply because they are not yet born. “That’s always stuck with me,” said Wesson. “It was almost malicious.”
An investigation into Ladybird’s misdiagnosis and death by abortion found that a false positive is “a well-recognized hazard of early CVS results.”
“Our daughter should be here,” Wesson said.
If abortion were treated as the murder that it is, rather than as health care, and was appropriately illegal rather than celebrated, Ladybird would be here. Their daughter would be here if doctors did not target her for death based on a diagnosis, and instead helped prepare the parents for caring for their baby in the time that they had with her.
The culture of death has come to expect parents to abort when they receive such a diagnosis, discriminating against individuals with disabilities, and spreading the lie that children’s lives are only valuable if they are deemed healthy, and therefore worthy. Whether she had Trisomy 13 or not, Ladybird did not deserve the horrific treatment she received.
Pressured into abortion before it was ‘too late’
Another couple, who asked to remain anonymous, shared with the BBC that they had an abortion in 2017 after a routine scan at 20 weeks showed abnormal development. Like Wesson, they were referred to City Hospital for a consult. A few days later, they were told their baby likely had a life-limiting genetic health condition, though the condition was not revealed by the BBC. The parents underwent genetic testing, and were told the results would be expedited. Several weeks went by, however, with no results.
“I kept calling the hospital every day asking for those test results, I had my very much-wanted baby kicking inside me,” the mother told the BBC. “I needed to know whether to disconnect from the pregnancy, as I didn’t know if my baby would survive. They never explained why we had this time pressure.”
Then suddenly, they received a call from the hospital telling them they had 24 hours to decide if they would have an abortion because the baby was one day shy of 24 weeks, and after 24 weeks it would be more complicated to undergo an abortion.
“[…] I got a frantic call in the late afternoon one day telling me we had to decide by the following day to terminate or it would be too late. It was horrific,” she said.
After 24 weeks, the UK protects most preborn children from abortion, though babies with a disability can be aborted. The couple decided to abort on the advice of their doctors, because the baby might not survive or might live with a health condition.
At 24 weeks, an induction abortion is the most commonly used abortion procedure. The abortionist will inject a feticide such as digoxin into the baby’s heart or brain to cause demise and then the baby will be delivered stillborn. This mother said she had to endure having the abortion at the maternity hospital where other mothers were giving birth to their living babies.
But then, when the aborted baby was assessed for this supposed genetic condition, the child was found to be healthy. The parents never received an explanation as to how or why their child was misdiagnosed and why they were so heavily pressured to abort.
Refusing abortion
Parents who receive a prenatal diagnosis for their child and are pressured to abort by doctors, or anyone else in their lives, have the right and power to refuse abortion and request to speak with specialists.
A third family told the BBC they nearly aborted their child after they were told that their preborn son likely had a life-limiting genetic condition. They had already been through the stillbirth of one child when the eight week scan with their second baby showed a concern.
“We were told that our baby wasn’t emptying his bladder, that’s what the big shape was,” said the mother. “If he couldn’t empty his bladder, he would either go on to be stillborn or live a very short life.”
A second scan showed that the “black hole” seen on the first scan was “even bigger.” They were offered an abortion.
“I really remember us then telling friends, not with a happy, joyful, ‘guess what, we’re pregnant.’ I was more of a ‘we’re having another baby and it’s going to die.’ [We did] things like planning that he would be buried in the place that we now visit with him [where his brother is buried],” she said.
When they went to Queen’s Medical Center to have the abortion, the father thankfully requested one final scan. “[A]nd absolutely crazily, while being scanned, our little baby emptied his bladder. So we didn’t end the pregnancy.”
The couple has never received an explanation from the hospital or doctor.
Hospital review
Senior midwife Donna Ockenden is leading a review into the maternity care at Nottingham University Hospital’s NHS Trust, and is expected to hear from 2,500 families about their experiences. That report has a planned publication date of June 2026.
Concerns surrounding the inaccuracy of prenatal testing have existed for years. Live Action News has reported on these prenatal screening tests in the past; these tests are marketed as a way for expectant parents to learn if a preborn child has a genetic health condition. However, the tests are meant to be used as a screening tool — to show that there is a chance the child may have a health condition for which to prepare, and further diagnostic testing is recommended and necessary. Yet the tests are being advertised and used as diagnostic tools, leading to devastating stories of parents who aborted their babies for health conditions they did not have.
In 2022, The New York Times drew attention to the high inaccuracy rate of non-invasive prenatal screening tests (NIPT), revealing that certain prenatal genetic tests are wrong up to 93% of the time.
Regardless of a child’s health status, no child deserves to be actively and intentionally killed because he has a health condition or disability. Likewise, no parent is expected to kill their born children when receiving a life-changing diagnosis, so why are parents expected to kill their preborn children?
