Important post

Tributes to Althea Hayton

Althea Hayton, founder of Womb Twin, passed away peacefully on August 13 (sorry for the delay in posting this news on the blog). We are all ...

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

I spent yesterday morning in an initial briefing with my personal Unltd mentor, Amy. This is such an excellent way to make use of public money - I say this not because some of it is coming my way, but because you get so much more than cash. You get legal and financial help and support; you get use of their offices for events; training in all kinds of skills; a chance to get to know other award winners. Making that application for an Unltd grant has proven to be one of the most rewarding things so far in this project, most of which has been fraught with difficulties and extremely isolating. So now I have friends and supporters and someone to turn to when all that positive energy drains away and I feel I can't do any more.

Then I spent the afternoon in the company of a TV producer, prospecting for a possible documentary on the survivors of abortion. I had pointed out that any fetus that survives an abortion attempt and is born reasonably intact is likely to have once been a fraternal twin. On that basis we had a session on the whole project:- twinning; my own story of the abortion attempt that killed my brother; abortion and how its done; the possible effects on the resultant child; the potentials for developing specific therapy and support for the survivor; funerals and rituals of mourning as part of the healing.

It will be many months before they begin to make this film. I do hope I can be in it. I also hope they dont forget to include "muli-fetal pregnancy reduction" which was once called "selective foetocide" but that was a bit too near the bone, so its now MFPR. It's abortion by another name, but this time it is intended that there will be at least one survivor, so that seems to be OK. That's when during IVF they get too many embryos developing and they kill several of the fetuses at about 10-12 weeks or so to reduce the number to twins or triplets.

Website giving advice to parents on MFPR

They worry about the effect on the parents, which is a start, but no one thinks about the survivors. That is, with the exception of Elizabeth Bryan, who highlighted this many years ago.

An interesting, if exhausting day......

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