You probably have no clue what anencephaly is, no wonder, it’s a fortunately rare genetic defects that causes a foetus to suffer a failure in the end of the neural tube, resulting in no or very little brain.
In most cases the baby, if you can call it that, doesn’t survive the birth, and rarely make it beyond a few hours or days, when it does survive.
In a few rare cases, it survives for days, sometimes even months, but only in the cases where the child has a functional brain stem.
The Brain stem handles most of the instinctual operations of the human body: breathing, digestion, reflexes and all the stuff you do without thinking.
The most common name for this unfortunate genetic disorder is frogbabies, for obvious reasons.
It’s probably caused by dangerous chemicals in our environment, basically the same reason for all the other miserable shit that’ll happen around stillbirths and most genetic disorders.
Ultimately, this is miserable, but in most cases either an abortion or a simple stillbirth occurs, the mother will be miserable for a while, and then move on.
In most cases that is, not this one: The story of Faith Hope.
This is some poor religious 23 year old American single mother, who gave birth to a girl with the Anencephaly disorder.
Originally she had accepted that the child would simply be stillborn, but was understandably feeling absolutely miserable.
No wonder, my sister gave birth to a perfectly healthy baby girl a few months back, and she was fucking terrified that something, anything, would go wrong with the pregnancy.
Fortunately enough, that boyfriend she found after she got pregnant kept her intact, nice guy really, my sister is lucky as fuck that he came around to pick her up.
But I’m getting away from the subject.
The problem here is that “Faith” was one of the rare cases where the baby had an intact brain stem, thus being able to survive at least for some time, due to breathing and most instincts being active.
Most normal people would just go, “Oh, how nice” and then accept the child’s ultimate demise.
She didn’t.
She thought the child was special and blessed by god, and despite warnings from highly educated doctors, she has gone for an alternative to normal logic and reason.
Internet Reinforcement. She’s set up a blog, a facebook group and pretty much everything she could, in order to gain attention to her problem.
Unfortunately for her, even if a billion people says the child is special, all it takes are a few dozen educated doctors presenting literally centuries of experiences with cases like this and go “Kid will be dead within days, unusual that it has made it this far, but it will die”, to simply win out over a billion stupid people who has no clue how the world works, and think that “faith” is an adequate replacement to reason.
The worst thing about this isn’t all the fundamentalist lunatics reinforcing her own ignorance and denial, it isn’t 4chan harassing her and it sure as hell isn’t me being and atheist and calling her stupid.
It’s the fact that the poor woman will be devastated when the poor child dies, with all the attention and maternal instinct she was invested in it, with all the reinforcement from idiots on the internet and with a complete lack of intervention from the family.
Will be lucky if she doesn’t kill herself in sheer overwhelming grief, the poor sod.
Sorry dear, the twitches are all reflexes and breathing doesn’t actually require a brain.
Kid can’t even swallow properly, even if the child defies 200 years of medical records, it sure as fuck wont be special without a brain.
Nonetheless, you have my most sincere condolences for when the inevitable happens.
Sincerely Philip “Ragnarokz” Balfour.