Florida mom Courtney Baker expected no bumps on the road when she learned a third child was on her way.
“My first two pregnancies were so easy. I was expecting this one to be easy too,” she told CNN.
But a couple weeks later, her baby was prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome.
The doctor suggested an abortion. He told her how tough life would be tending to a disabled child. He made her feel unsupported.
Their daughter Emersyn is now 15 months old and the light of her life. And Baker felt she couldn’t hold in her feelings about that day any longer.
So she sat down and wrote the doctor a letter.
The letter
“I’m not angry. I’m not bitter. I’m really just sad,” Baker wrote in the letter, which she posted on her Facebook page.
“Instead of support and encouragement, you suggested we abort our child. I told you her name and you asked us again if we understood how low our quality of life would be with a child with Down syndrome.”
But that’s not been the case, she said.
“Emersyn has not only added to our quality of life, she’s touched the hearts of thousands. She’s opened our eyes to true beauty and pure love.”
In the letter, Baker said she and her husband dreaded their appointments from their very first visit to the doctor.
“The most difficult time in my life was made nearly unbearable because you never told me the truth. My child was perfect.”
She told CNN she lacked support and information. “We didn’t know what to do next.”
The doctor wanted to talk to her and her husband, Matt, about options.
“There are no options,” she recalled telling him. “We’re going to keep her.”
The response
She summed up her feelings in closing the letter:
“My prayer is that no other mommy will ever have to go through what I did. My prayer is that you, too, will now see true beauty and pure love with every life displayed on every sonogram. And my prayer is when you see that next baby with Down syndrome lovingly tucked in her mother’s womb, you will look at that mommy and see me, then tell her the truth…
“Your child is absolutely perfect.”
Baker says she doesn’t know if the doctor has received the letter.
But the note has struck a nerve with other parents.
And that was her intention. In sharing her story, she hopes that nobody else has the same experience.
“I can’t imagine anybody else going through what I went through,” she said.