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"I was feeling lazy on Sunday night. (Wait, that&amp;#x27;s what Sunday nights are for, right? Right?) JD was sound asleep (Next to me. In my bed. I know. Bad mommy.) and Desperate Housewives wasn&amp;#x27;t on. Flipping through the channels I stopped on TLC when I heard something uttered about a &amp;quot;Mermaid Girl.&amp;quot; A mermaid girl!?! I got completely engrossed in the documentary about Shiloh Pepin, an 8-year-old with the disorder, Sirenomelia--a rare congenital deformity in which the legs are fused together, giving the appearance of a mermaid. Most babies born with Sirenomelia die within days. Shiloh is the only known survivor in the world with the disorder and despite the obstacles, she&amp;#x27;s chosen to live.Shiloh was born without a rectum, a vagina and a uterus. She has one ovary and just a small part of one kidney. She goes to the bathroom in waste bags attached to her body and her parents change those bags once a day. Shiloh&amp;#x27;s mother and father are her constant caretakers. Shiloh can scoot around by shimmying her body across the floor, but mainly relies on a wheelchair. She&amp;#x27;s undergone over 150 medical procedures, takes a half-a-dozen cocktails to keep her healthy each morning and sees her doctor, &amp;quot;Dr. Matt,&amp;quot; once a month, unless an otherwise medical crisis occurs and she is rushed to the hospital. This happens. Shiloh loves her family and friends. Her room is dotted with toy butterflies. She enjoys sausage and egg biscuits best at breakfast and had a special wet suit made so she could swim in a public pool, that due to her waste bags was prohibited. In the wet suit, Shiloh shrieked: &amp;quot;I&amp;#x27;m a mermaid!&amp;quot; and splashed happily in the pool. She&amp;#x27;s a happy little girl, but she&amp;#x27;s also quite sick. Her spine is twisting at a rapid rate and Dr. Matt wanted to attempt to separate her legs. Shiloh, 8, refused and her parents gave her that option. Should they have intervened? Shiloh&amp;#x27;s mom, Leslie, suffered a still birth prior to Shiloh. The baby was born dead at eight-months-old. Heartbreaking. My God. Unsure whether she and her husband, Elmer, could conceive again, they (like most couples) were excited to find out they were expecting again. BUT, an early ultrasound showed a marker. A huge marker. The fetus&amp;#x27; legs did not move. Frame-to-frame they remained still while the rest of her body bounced normally against the uterine wall. Leslie&amp;#x27;s doctor advised she terminate the pregnancy--that the baby would be born with severe defects. Obviously, the couple did not abort the fetus but here&amp;#x27;s my Q to you: Would you carry a baby to term if you knew she would be born with severe defects like Shiloh? What about if Downs Syndrome was detected like in Sarah Palin&amp;#x27;s case? I stared at the computer screen trying to come up with my own answer for all of you and my only reasoning is before I found out I was pregnant I was very flip about abortion. I might not have one if ever put in the position. And, eh, I might have one...Well, put in the position (the first and only time) with JD&amp;#x27;s heart flickering at 5.5 weeks I knew the answer...Nope. Hard to say exactly what any of us would do until we&amp;#x27;re in those uncertain shoes. Discuss...Try at least. Watch Mermaid Girl on TLC on 12/26/08 at 8pm and 11pm."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/sex-love-life/blogs/storked/2008/12/mermaid-girl-tktk>