Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Love Fulfills the Law (07/09/26)
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TITLE: Called to love | Previous Challenge Entry
By Folakemi Emem-Akpan
07/16/26 -
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Lily is asleep, hands pillowed beneath her head, her body bowed in that comfortable fetal position. She is making mewling noises, probably dreaming of nursing.
Three days after I pushed her into the world, she is still here. And she will be here for a long, long time.
Our first child, Timothy, was born with Down syndrome. We hadn't known, and when I pushed him into the world, his otherness was the first thing the doctors noticed. The world, our families included, expected that this sweet child would burden us out of our minds. Yes, he was intellectually delayed and medically fragile, but we had known nothing else. He was our first, and we loved him with a desperate kind of love.
"Only if you had known..." Joy, my mother-in-law, had muttered very quietly one day as I gave Timothy his breathing treatment. That hot afternoon, it became very clear what thought: If only we had known what a challenge Timothy would bring us, perhaps we would have chosen not to have him.
It had never occurred to us that we would choose not to have a child, conceived from our own bodies, simply because he was different. We had trusted God with the entirety of our lives and our future hopes. Why wouldn't we trust that He would give us the child He wanted us to have? Whatever his physical and intellectual differences were, Tim was ours, he was God's, and we loved him.
Five years later, we got pregnant with Lily. And at the ten-week ultrasound, the imaging specialist had squinted his eyes again and again at the monitor. Then he'd excused himself and quietly left. When he returned, he was all professional, but his smile was very bright, very forced, very unnatural.
Later, in the doctor's office, we got the diagnosis of bilateral renal agenesis. Without her kidneys, our baby wouldn’t live more than a week post-birth.
As I sobbed and felt my soul leave my body, Benjamin's arms came around me. His hug, that warm, safe space of him, stabilized me, centered me, and my sobs subsided.
"It's still early enough for pills if you would like to terminate the pregnancy!" It felt inhumane to be told your child was born to die and to be advised to terminate her. Although the doctor's voice was gentle and compassionate, his words felt cruel.
I saw Benjamin shaking his head. "We will be keeping this child, no matter how long or how short we have him or her." Those were the exact words that had come to my heart, only that Ben had spoken before I could.
We hugged the news to ourselves for the next month, coming to terms with what it would mean to have a special-needs child for the rest of our lives and another who’ die almost as soon as she was born. It was a hard, hard thing to digest, and I cried often and badly.
But we knew, without a doubt, that God had called us to love the children He entrusted to us, healthy or sick. We were called to love without condition, and that we would do.
The pressure from family and friends, when they eventually got to know, was untellable.
"Timothy complicates your life enough!" Joy was on a personal mission to see us abort, and her fury only grew as my belly grew.
My pregnancy would be monitored very closely. I would take ultrasounds every two weeks, and it would be in the sixteenth week of pregnancy that the doctors would start becoming surprised, and in the twentieth week that they were mouth agape with wonder.
Bilateral renal agenesis meant the baby wasn’t producing urine, so I was not supposed to have any amniotic fluid after the sixteenth week, but I did, and by the twenty-third week, another ultrasound would find a kidney. One little itty-bitty kidney.
My baby's diagnosis would be changed from bilateral renal agenesis to unilateral. And instead of being incompatible with life, she was now deemed compatible.
As I watched my baby, perfect except for the one missing kidney, I wondered what would have happened had we chosen to terminate, had we followed the doctor's termination recommendation. What if we had not obeyed the call to love irrespective of birth defects, of differences?
*False-positive rates for birth defects can range from 10% for common conditions to upwards of 80% for rare genetic syndromes.*
Romans 13:8
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