Trisomy 18 confronts us as parents with many uncertainties.
Hopefully, once recovering from your initial shock and adjusting to the realities of the diagnosis itself, you have also had time for more detailed assessments and scans that give you more certain information about your child’s medical situation. You should now have more detailed data on how Trisomy 18 is impacting your baby’s developing body in specific ways. And based on that you have made hard decisions about how to proceed toward delivery based on how severely impacted your baby may be. Every baby is a unique individual in terms of how Trisomy 18 affects their organs and ability to grow.
Many babies will not make it to a live birth and you may face a stillborn delivery instead of a live birth even if wish for your pregnancy to proceed naturally. You have already made brave decisions about what is in your child’s best medical interests in terms of how your manage your pregnancy. Planning how you wish to deliver your baby is different for every family and every child. No matter how well we plan, realities at the time of delivery may change what is possible. Most of all, if our babies time with us is to be brief, we want to be prepared for that possibility to value what time may be granted, as a family. Whatever your wishes are for your little’s one lifetime, we want to support you in creating the type of delivery experience that honors your family’s decisions about the best interests of your child.
