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NRL News
Mother
Refused Partial-Birth Abortion Fifteen-year-old Donna Joy could easily have been a victim of partial-birth abortion, if not for her mother’s determination to give her life. Now, Donna Joy and Lori Vance are celebrating the Supreme Court’s April 18 decision outlawing the abortion technique, happy that other unborn babies will not be threatened with such a gruesome death. “I am really happy about my law,” said Donna Joy in a hand-written statement. “I am glad my mom did not let me die. It is a good law. It saves babies.” Donna Joy is thriving at home in Tennessee, an eighth-grader at Rogersville Middle School and a proud member of her church drama team and choir. She also participates in the state Special Olympics, where she won a blue ribbon in bowling last fall and is looking forward to running the 400 meter dash in the next competition. Lori Vance was pregnant with Donna Joy in 1991 when doctors diagnosed her unborn baby with serious brain defects: the two hemispheres did not separate properly, some of the brain was outside of the skull and some was missing, and the brain stem was damaged. “She was given a choice - complete the pregnancy or follow the doctors’ advice and agree to a procedure commonly called a ‘partial birth abortion,’” according to the Times-News. Vance refused to listen to the doctors, and finally found a hospital who would deliver her baby after she threatened a lawsuit. She continued to fight to get proper care for Donna Joy in the difficult early months of her life. “I suppose I could have listened to all of the voices calling for her murder,” Lori Vance said. “I chose to hear the only voice that mattered, the voice of truth. I knew that her life did not belong to me, she belonged to her creator, God. He was giving me a gift, for however long, to enjoy, not to destroy.” Vance joined the effort to pass a partial-birth abortion ban in 1997, after watching a debate on television in which she heard some of the people involved in the debate say that children with the same brain defects as Donna Joy could not be saved,” according to Times-News. “Donna Joy was 5 at the time, and Vance yelled at the TV, ‘That’s not true!’” “I felt a righteous sense of rage welling up inside of me when people who did not even know her, began talking as if she had no right to live in this country just because she was handicapped,” she told NRL News. She got in touch with then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), who told Donna Joy’s story on the floor of the Senate during debate on the partial-birth abortion ban in 1997. (See NRL News, December 2003. Lori has remarried and their last name is now Vance.) They also attended the ceremony in November 2003 when President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act into law. The Supreme Court’s April 18 decision upholding that law thrilled Lori and Donna Joy. “I literally jumped up and down,” Lori said. Lori and Donna Joy plan to continue speaking out for life. “I don’t know why Donna Joy’s alive, medically speaking,” Vance told NRL News. “But I know that God still has work for her to do. |