Morning sickness drove Claire to abort TWO babies... now she’s trying to get pregnant again!

On the face of it Claire Barwell looks like your typical school-run mum. She juggles her job as a customer services adviser with caring for her two young children, Bethany, ten, and Abbey, six.

But Claire is tortured by a controversial decision she made just three months ago to abort her much wanted baby at eight weeks while in the grip of an illness that pushed her to the brink of her health and sanity.
And, shockingly, it’s not the first termination she admits to: Claire aborted another perfectly healthy baby four years ago.

So what on earth would possess a loving mother to keep ending the lives of her healthy babies? 

Claire is one of an estimated one per cent of women who suffer from an extreme form of morning sickness known as hyperemesis gravidarum (HG).

Last June, the devastating condition hit the headlines when 34-year-old mother-of-one Cheryl Harrison, from East Yorkshire, told the Daily Mail of her decision to abort her baby at nine weeks after vomiting up to 40 times a day.

Her story prompted an avalanche of responses from readers ranging from outrage to sympathy, and today Cheryl admits not a day goes by when she doesn’t think of her unborn child.

It would be all too easy to sit in judgment of women such as Claire and Cheryl and accuse them of being selfishly ill-equipped to deal with the rigours of morning sickness. But they are far from unique cases.

This week, experts said there had been a rise in abortions among mothers denied morning sickness drugs. 
In a review of research on the condition, Professor Roger Gadsby, of the University of Warwick, said doctors are failing to treat morning sickness because of fears about birth defects — as happened with the anti-morning sickness drug thalidomide prescribed in the Fifties — and this has contributed to a three-fold rise in the number of women admitted to hospital with severe nausea and vomiting in the past 20 years. 

Instead of prescribing medication such as diclectin, which is used in Canada and the U.S., doctors here advocate the use of natural remedies only.

But these can be ineffective, leading many women such as Claire to choose to terminate their pregnancies rather than suffer.

For such is the acute anguish that extreme morning sickness provokes that it reduces many ordinary women to drink castor oil to induce the birth, fantasise about miscarriages, beg for abortions and, in its most extreme form, such as Claire’s, undergo multiple terminations.

Claire believes she only made it through her earlier pregnancies, in 2000 and 2004, thanks to her parents.

‘During my first two pregnancies, terminating wasn’t an option,’ she says. ‘I strongly disapproved of abortion and my family vowed we’d get through it together.’

Sometimes she would end up on a drip in hospital three times a week.

But when she became pregnant for a third time in October 2006, she was terrified — not only of the sickness, but because she knew her marriage was falling apart and, as a result, she would have to endure the agony of the next nine months alone.

Just six weeks into her pregnancy, Claire was already unable to eat anything and so weak from vomiting and retching that she was admitted to Kettering General Hospital.
She was treated with anti-nausea drugs, given intravenous fluids to  treat dehydration and discharged after three days.
But at 11 weeks she was readmitted with the same symptoms. And at the 12-week point she found herself unable to endure any more.

‘I begged for alternative treatment, but was told there was nothing beyond what I’d been given, and that wasn’t working,’ she says.

Desperate, she told her estranged husband that she wanted to end the pregnancy. ‘He said it was my decision,’ she recalls. ‘He loved our girls, but as we had already split, a pregnancy did complicate matters.’
Feelings among her friends and relatives were mixed.
‘My twin Suzanne was incredibly supportive, as were my friends; they’d witnessed how ill I’d been,’ says Claire.

‘But my older sister expressed concern and shock. As far as she was concerned, a life was a life and I should have toughed it out.’ Claire’s GP referred her to an abortion counsellor, as is required by law.

‘I felt so dreadful that I just wanted to get it over and done with,’ she says. ‘I didn’t feel happy about it, but the decision was clear in my mind.’

In January 2007, Claire — still 12 weeks pregnant — underwent a termination under anaesthetic.

‘Afterwards I was crippled with guilt,’ she says. ‘I felt desperately low. It was not something I was proud of at all.’

At the same time, however, she admits to feeling ‘a strange sense of relief’ because the sickness disappeared — almost instantaneously.
‘I couldn’t wait to get home and put that painful chapter of my life behind me,’ she says. ‘The way I saw it was that I had to concentrate on being a mother to my girls. It was a horrible, nasty mess, but one I was relieved to be out of.’

Six months later, Claire met David, a 28-year-old chef. She talks of love at first sight, of how kind and gentle he was with her girls — and how understanding he was when she told him about her termination.

They moved in together and married in August 2008. David tentatively made it clear he would like a child of his own despite his wife’s troubled past.
And Claire convinced herself that, with a different father, pregnancy might actually be a pleasurable experience.

‘I did lots of research online this time,’ she says. ‘I found one report suggesting that having a child with a different man may alter your chances of getting HG again. I clung to this.’

In December 2010, full of hope, she discovered she was pregnant.
‘I was ecstatic and David was over the moon,’ she says.

But despite following online advice to take vitamin D and anti-nausea drugs before the sickness started, it made no difference at all. 
In fact, Claire later discovered HG can grow in severity with each successive pregnancy.

Six weeks into the pregnancy, she awoke with a start. ‘My stomach was churning and I realised the HG was back,’ she says.

Claire began to vomit up to 40 times a day, the stomach acid making her oesophagus unbearably raw. She says she was often too weak even to lift her head to be sick. ‘But I vowed to carry on with the pregnancy,’ she says. ‘I was with a loving, supportive man. Whatever happened, I would get through it.’
Claire’s GP signed her off sick from work, but at home things rapidly worsened. ‘I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat,’ she recalls. ‘My eyes were so sore I couldn’t even have the lights on.

‘If I tried to get out of bed, I’d  collapse on the floor. I was crippled with terrible migraines. It was so bad I genuinely thought I was dying. My head pounded, I couldn’t think straight, my hormones were raging. I wanted to curl into a ball.’

David, she says, was nothing but supportive, although understandably disturbed by what his wife was experiencing.

At seven and a half weeks, Claire was admitted to Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham with extreme dehydration. ‘I hadn’t eaten for three days,’ she says. ‘A feeding tube was strapped to my nose to rehydrate me, but barely an hour would pass without my throwing up again. The nurses were at a loss as to what to do.
‘I was bed-bound, sick and drowning in misery. I remember thinking: "How can I survive like this for another seven months?"

‘I rang David in hysterics. I told him I wanted the baby, but couldn’t go on like that.’
With hindsight, Claire says she wishes David had begged her to persevere. ‘He was in a state of utter shock,’ says Claire. ‘He didn’t know how to help, and he crumbled.’
And so she reached another haunting decision — one which she says was made out of sheer desperation. ‘It sounds crazy, but I couldn’t see a baby inside me, just a burning ball of pain and agony.

‘I wasn’t just physically ill, I was mentally destroyed, my brain so starved of fluid nothing made sense any more. I felt like I was dying and a survival instinct kicked in.’
Without discussing her decision with any of the hospital staff, Claire rang a private clinic and booked a termination. She was eight weeks' pregnant when it was done. Afterwards, once more, she felt crushing guilt.

‘Now that I was no longer ill, I was able to think rationally,’ she says. ‘I remember thinking — and still think it today — what on earth had I done?

‘But unless you’re in that situation, you can’t appreciate how soul-destroying it is to be that sick.’

Squeezing his wife’s hand, David adds: ‘I would love to be a dad, and I will support my wife all the way. We both wish she hadn’t had the termination and wish we’d carried on. I miss our baby a lot and will always wonder what could have been.’

Which is why the couple have recently taken a bold — some would say reckless — decision. They are going to try for a child again.

‘This time, if I become pregnant, my twin Suzanne has agreed I can stay with her, as only she really understands how bad things can get,’ says Claire.

‘David is too weak and will crack because he can’t bear to see me suffering. He may be tempted to give into to my pleas for an abortion if I am as ill as I was last time.

‘But I will give Suzanne my mobile phone and tell her that under no circumstances must she let me book a termination or leave the house — no matter how bad things get.’

It’s a plan which doesn’t inspire much faith.

‘One wonders why she would go on trying to get pregnant?’ a spokesman for the ProLife Alliance told the Mail.

‘This is a serious condition. Termination is not the answer. The problem here lies in trying to cure the illness. The terminations must only be adding to her trauma, not relieving it.’

Further research into HG is undoubtedly needed. Psychologist Dr Brian Swallow, co-coordinator of the Pregnancy Sickness Support conference, says too many doctors trivialise morning sickness.

‘Hyperemesis gravidarum can be far more serious than anyone realises,’ says Dr Swallow, who is based at the University of Lincoln.

‘Women consistently say they feel quite alone because there is insufficient help.

‘In some parts of the country, hospital staff are very sympathetic. But in others, morning sickness is just seen as something women have to put up with. We need a national protocol to offer counselling and support.’

In the meantime, Claire must hope she copes rather better with her next pregnancy, if it comes.

She talks of being ‘desperate’ to carry a child again, and says it is ‘the only thing that keeps me going’.

It’s impossible not to question the terrible toll her struggle is taking on her — both physically and mentally — and wonder whether, in the end, she should stop now before any more damage is done to her or an unborn child.