Amber Rojas was 35 years old and a mother to four born children when she and her husband Fernando delivered their daughter, Amadeus Reign Rojas (nicknamed Ami) in a water birth. Right away, according to PEOPLE, Amber noticed that her daughter looked different from her other children. “… [A]s soon as I picked [Ami] up out of the water, I noticed her eyes were slanting opposite the way that my kids’ eyes slant. I thought to myself, ‘I think she has Down syndrome.’” At Love What Matters, Amber says the midwife told her, “I don’t want to worry you, but your daughter has a few Down syndrome markers.” Amber said to herself, ” I knew it! I KNEW IT!”
Amber shares more details of Ami’s delivery, saying:
I’m a planner and I love education and I knew nothing about kids with Down syndrome. After getting out of the tub and nursing her I could feel that she felt differently than all my others. She felt really limp, and her eyes. We all have small eyes, but hers were small in a different way. I kept thinking, ‘Why isn’t anyone saying anything?’ Then I saw her breathing and it was just like how I felt it in my stomach (now I know it’s due to her heart defect) — fast and consistent….
I knew something was different when I was pregnant, and then I immediately became a worker bee. I wanted to know everything they knew about babies with Down syndrome so I could best care for my daughter, Amadeus. We didn’t care that she had Down syndrome because we were all obsessed with her and all her chromosomes!
PEOPLE reports that Amber’s 20-week ultrasound “detected no signs of risks for a heart defect or Down syndrome,” However, Ami did have a heart defect and recently, at five months of age, she underwent heart surgery to correct it.
Often when Down syndrome is detected, no matter how late in pregnancy, doctors recommend abortion and present inaccurate, outdated information to families, leaving them to feel as if abortion is the best, most merciful option. But abortion is not merciful. Dr. Anthony Levatino, a former abortionist, describes a D&E abortion, which is typically committed on preborn children between 13 and 24 weeks gestation — right around the time when many children are found to have some sort of defect or disability via a 20-week ultrasound:
Despite the fear that comes with a prenatal diagnosis, Amber described for Love What Matters what life is really like having a child with Down syndrome:
To us, she’s like all the other babies we have had! She needs milk. She cries when she’s wet or uncomfortable. She smiles when she sees us, and we love her fiercely! God gave us Amadeus for a reason. Our family was going a million different ways and Amadeus has brought us together. We are learning together about a whole community that we never knew anything about. But at the end of the day she IS our baby and we are her FAMILY! To us she is perfect. We don’t see her diagnosis or her label — we see Amadeus Reign Rojas.”
She added for PEOPLE, “I feel like kids who are born with disabilities, their disabilities are only as big as what people allow it to be…. She’s going to be stronger because she is part of this big, giant family. She completes our family.”
