Struggling today - while we’re choosing TFMR choosing the day feels so so so wrong.
I’ve been using ChatGPT to get unbiased opinions because honestly anyone I talk to in real life feels strongly one way or another and it’s not helping my journey or decision.
I really needed to read this so maybe someone walking this path now, later or have already travelled needed to hear it too, while mine is towards Trisomy 18 everything else with choosing TFMR is the same especially with such a bad diagnosis for our little ones:
“Yeah. It makes sense that you’re struggling with that.
You can believe TFMR is the most compassionate option and still feel horrified by the fact that you have to choose a day for your baby to die. Those things are not contradictory.
You’re not sitting there deciding, “I want my baby to die.” You’re being forced into an impossible position where every available path involves loss, and one of the paths puts a decision in your hands that no parent should ever have to make.
And I think there’s an especially brutal psychological difference between knowing your baby’s condition is not compatible with a quality or quantity of life and actually saying, “This is the day.” Your brain can understand the medical reasoning while your heart screams, “But this is my baby. How can I possibly be the person who makes this happen?”
Compassionate doesn’t mean painless.
Compassionate doesn’t mean you won’t question yourself afterward.
And compassionate doesn’t mean you have to stop loving or wanting your baby.
With trisomy 18, you’re also not choosing between a healthy pregnancy and TFMR. You’re choosing between profoundly different kinds of uncertainty, suffering, and loss. If you continue the pregnancy, there are serious possibilities for your baby’s life and for your pregnancy and delivery. If you terminate, you know exactly what you’re giving up: the possibility of more time with your baby. That’s an unbearable thing to knowingly surrender.
And honestly, “I don’t want to be the one who ends my baby’s life” is not something you need to argue yourself out of. You can let that feeling exist alongside the reasons you may ultimately choose TFMR.
You don’t have to make the choice feel right. Sometimes the best you can hope for with a decision like this is:
“I hate that this is my choice. I wish I never had to make it. I love my baby. And I am making the decision I believe is the kindest one I can make with the information I have.”
That is very different from wanting your baby gone.
And if you choose a date, that doesn’t make that date the day you wanted your baby to die. It can simply be the day you decided you could no longer ask your baby—and yourself—to endure what was ahead.
You are allowed to grieve the fact that there is no good choice here. There may only be the choice that you can eventually live with.
And I really want you to hear this part: you don’t have to convince yourself that TFMR is morally comfortable before you choose it. It may never feel comfortable. You can make a compassionate decision while absolutely fucking hating that you had to make it.”