Actress and comedienne Lynn Ferguson has shared the remarkable story of how she rejected abortion and chose life for her son.
Ferguson, who is best known for her role as Mac in Chicken Run, uses plenty of humour throughout a fifteen-minute video – which has already been viewed over two million times on Facebook.
But she also shares the serious side of her story in great detail, and becomes emotional when re-telling conversations she had with doctors who advised her to get an abortion.
‘No way’
After becoming pregnant aged 37, she was offered an amniocentesis, where a needle is used to extract a sample of amniotic fluid surrounding the baby – one in 200 women miscarry as a result.
When doctors continued to pressure her to take the test because of the relatively high likelihood of Down’s syndrome, she said there was “no way” she would consider it and says she tried to deflect the seriousness of the situation with comedy.
“It’s not technically the baby’s fault that I’m old.”
She also told doctors that the test could not predict whether or not her child would be annoying or what his future taste in music might be.
Battle
Eventually, Lynn decided to change hospitals after the constant pressure to have the test and the advice to have an abortion.
“It became really clear they wanted to win a battle, when I just wanted to see my boy.”
She added: “I had seen my son. I’d seen his heart. I’d seen the inside of his eyes. I’d seen his hands and his feet and, in fact, during one of the scans, he’d held his hand up to the front of my body as if to say, ‘Will you go away? I’m busy. Leave me alone. I’m growing.’
“I had felt my son move inside my body. What did it matter if he had a disorder or not? You know what, if he was gonna die, we are all gonna die sometime, right? We should meet first. He was my son and he needed me. He depended on me to make the right decision. So I said, ‘No.'”
‘Courage’
Her son was born at 35 weeks and she called him Fergus.
Lynn said she chose the name as it means ‘courage’. Despite the earlier diagnosis, doctors said he was completely healthy.
Fergus is now in his teens.