Abortion advocates today are bombarding the media with the message that women need abortion if their child has a life-limiting diagnosis. However, one young woman is now sharing her story of choosing life after learning her daughter would likely die at birth.
Ava Trammell recently sat down with Zach Rippey on the “I Like Birds” podcast. She talked about unexpectedly getting pregnant while in high school, and the sorrow she felt after an ultrasound revealed that her preborn daughter, Sophie, had no kidneys. Doctors told Trammell Sophie was “incompatible with life,” and immediately offered her the opportunity to abort her daughter.
“I’ve never heard myself make a sound like the cries that were coming out of my body…” Trammell said, regarding the day the ultrasound revealed Sophie’s condition. She had just felt her preborn daughter kick for the first time.
“And I’m just sitting there sobbing, and my mom’s sobbing… and so I finally look at [tje doctor and sonographer]… and [the doctor] goes on to tell me… ‘we’re not finding any renal arteries’…. She says, ‘We believe that your baby has what’s called bilateral renal agenesis, which is the absence of both kidneys, which will ultimately cause her to be incompatible for life outside of the womb. You have two options: you can either go out of state… and get an abortion — just don’t come back and tell us about it if you do decide to make that choice… because she does have a heartbeat… so it’s not legal here.'”
Or the other option, the doctor told her, was “to go full term… that’s even if you make it full term…. Because of low amniotic fluid, [Sophie] could turn over, lay on her umbilical cord, and suffocate in the womb.”
Her doctors said that essentially, “What would eventually cause [Sophie] to pass away would be lack of lung development. It could be three minutes, three hours, we don’t know how long she would live.”
Trammel said she refused abortion, noting that her womb was the safest place for her daughter.
“She’s safe in my womb. And at this point, I’ve been following a million pro-life organizations on Instagram — I know what an abortion looks like. I don’t think I could bear to have her ripped piece by piece out of my womb and shorten the life that’s already so short,” she said tearfully. “Take her away from a spot where God has placed her in my hands, in my womb, where she’s safe and she’s warm, and she only knows love and she doesn’t know pain. Why would I give her such a painful death when she’s perfectly fine with me?”
READ: Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir details abortion regret: ‘I couldn’t live with myself’
Ava’s Instagram post about Sophie’s birth
Trammel continued her pregnancy with tremendous support from her parents and her Christian community, and Sophie did pass away shortly after birth. But she described having a few moments with Sophie snuggling into her chest after she was born. “I remember feeling her kind of breathe, and I remember her moving around, and those are literally moments that are going to stick with me for the rest of my life,” she said.
Trammel’s full story is one of hope, faith, and peace, knowing that God had His hand in it all. In continuing her pregnancy, she ensured that God was in control of Sophie’s life from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death, and though she says she prayed for a miracle, she surrendered when she realized that wasn’t to be. Her beautiful, heartfelt witness is an antidote to so much of the pro-abortion rhetoric today, and proves that women do not need to kill their child in the womb and can instead offer that child peace and love, for however long God has determined.
