The Archbishop of Canterbury has said he and his wife felt pressure from doctors to have an abortion when health concerns were raised during the pregnancy with their “precious” daughter, who has dyspraxia and is now 32.
The Most Rev Justin Welby supported a call from the Church of England on Sunday urging the new Labour government and the NHS to ensure that pregnant women whose foetuses are diagnosed with a disability are given “comprehensive” information about the support available to parents raising disabled children, to reduce the chance of them choosing to have an abortion.
He spoke in support of a motion at the General Synod in York calling for a change to medical culture to “challenge the common assumption that bringing a disabled child into the world is a tragedy to be avoided”.
The church formally holds a “principled opposition” to abortion and deems that “all abortions are tragedies”, but recognises that “there can be strictly limited conditions under which abortion may be morally preferable to any available alternative”.
Welby cited the example of his daughter, Ellie whose condition affects movement and co-ordination. He said: “She lives with us at Lambeth. Before she was born, during the pregnancy, there was some concern and a test was offered. But it was made very, very clear to my wife [Caroline] that if the test was taken and proved positive, it would be expected that we asked for a termination. It was not a neutral process.”
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He said that doctors told them it was “expensive” to raise a child with a disability. He did not say whether they went ahead with the test.
Welby added: “Ellie is exceptionally precious. She is precious because she is wonderful, she’s kind, she is someone who gets cross and is happy and is sad. She is not that severely disabled — she can travel around provided things go right. If trains get cancelled, that’s a bit of an emergency. She has been chucked off a bus by a ticket inspector who didn’t believe her disability card was genuine and so on.”
He recalled: “When we were having a conversation about divine healing round the table one weekend, with all the children there apart from Ellie, the question was asked: ‘What would happen if Ellie was healed? What would it look like?’ and one of the children said, ‘She wouldn’t be Ellie’.”
The motion was backed unanimously by 312 members of the synod in a debate during which many members were reduced to tears as they described their own experiences with disability. It added that the church must “call upon [the] government and healthcare providers to ensure that mothers whose unborn child may be disabled are given comprehensive information about the condition and the support available to them”.
Rebecca Chapman, a lay member of the synod, said the church had to change its own attitudes as well, noting: “Church is not always welcoming of difference or disability.”
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Ellie Welby told the BBC’s Ouch! podcast in 2018: “The church I go to, I sit at the back because I don’t really feel comfortable. They’re very friendly, but sometimes I can feel a bit out of place there. People have looked at me … like: ‘You’re not disabled, why are you sitting there?’ Or ‘why can’t you do this?’ I’ve been discriminated against quite a few times because they don’t understand it.”
