Former Wichitan Dortha Biggs deals with conflicting truths daily.
She loves her daughter, Lesli Shanin Jacobs, 49, with all her heart and seeks to provide the best life possible for a blind, deaf, developmentally disabled person able to communicate only through touch.
And Biggs also wishes her cherished daughter had never been born. The father of the child, her ex-husband, is at odds with that wish.
Lesli was born in Wichita Falls in 1969 with severe disabilities stemming from the rubella Biggs contracted early in her pregnancy.
Party to a decades-old, groundbreaking wrongful birth lawsuit, Biggs said she would have obtained an abortion if her doctor had diagnosed the illness, which he never tested her for.
“As much as she’s loved, her life just hasn’t been all that wonderful for her,” Biggs said by telephone from her Medicine Park, Okla., home. “I would never have let her suffer like this if I could have avoided it.”
“She does not have a life other than suffering and being in a wheelchair all day,” Biggs said. “I do not choose that for her.”
She worries a women’s right to choose is steadily eroding and supports a lawsuit filed Thursday in Texas to reverse abortion restrictions.
“I hope this group prevails and thank them for taking up the cause for women and their children,” she said. “No choice is an easy one, but it must be left in the hands of a woman and her doctor.”
The matter of Lesli is clear cut for Biggs’ ex-husband, George Jacobs, and his wife of many years, Jackie Jacobs, both of Wichita Falls.
“We feel very, very antiabortion,” Jackie said during an interview with the couple in their living room.
They believe Lesli is here for a purpose, Jackie said.
“We strongly feel that because of her situation, there have been many positive things that have come from her birth … not just for her but for other special needs children,” Jackie said.
They deeply love Lesli and will visit the group home where she lives this summer in Cypress.
George and Jackie will bring other family members to spend time with Leslie and hold her hands, giving her the touch that lets her know she’s loved.
George has been perplexed that he and his ex-wife’s wrongful birth lawsuit has been pointed to in the media as furthering the cause of abortion rights.
He said his intention was solely that women should be informed of risks to their unborn child if there is an issue such as he and Biggs faced. Abortion was never his wish.
“Knowing there’s an issue and getting an abortion are two different things,” Jackie said.
A private couple who created a family of their own, they don’t desire to be in the spotlight but reluctantly agreed to an interview to clear the air about their beliefs.
“Our belief is that life begins with a heartbeat,” Jackie said.
Biggs took time from planning her mother’s 100th birthday party to recall living in Wichita Falls.
Biggs graduated from Midwestern State University, began teaching at Crockett Elementary School and married George. They lived on Kingsbury Drive off Seymour Highway. Biggs also taught at Barwise Junior High and Hirschi High School.
Two and a half weeks pregnant with Lesli, her second child, Biggs noticed a rash. Later she talked about it with her physician, Dr. Louis Theimer, but he chalked it up to a reaction to an antibiotic.
When Lesli was 2, her parents filed a lawsuit against Theimer.
After the lawsuit’s journey through lower courts, the Texas Supreme Court found in their favor Feb. 19, 1975, setting a precedent that parents could sue for a wrongful birth.
Some of the $200,000 settlement is left in spite of 20 surgeries and other needs for Lesli, Biggs said.
“We didn’t want to get rich,” she said. “We just wanted help taking care of her bills.”
Lesli’s pediatrician sent them a letter saying he would no longer be their daughter’s doctor because of the lawsuit, leading to a move to Dallas to seek care for Lesli. Biggs went into special education.
Last year, state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Montgomery County, unsuccessfully attempted to pass a bill squashing wrongful birth lawsuits. Since then, Biggs has felt she must be more vigilant and speak out.
“It’s really just so sad that we need to stand up, and we need to fight for those rights,” she said. “It takes as much to hang on to them as it did to get them. We just all need to do our part.”
She knows some wish she wouldn’t speak out, but, nearing 80, she is past caring what others think of her. She worries the younger generation assumes women’s rights will always be there.
“It’s almost like they’re going to have to lose their rights before they really put out that effort to keep them,” Biggs said.
She and her husband Tom fly down to visit Lesli periodically.
“She’s totally dependent on others to help her. She can feed herself a little bit if someone is standing by,” Biggs said. “But as far as ever expressing herself, her pains or her wants, she does not have any of that ability.”
On Thursday, Whole Woman’s Health Alliance, other abortion providers and abortion advocates sued Texas in federal court in Austin to reverse the state’s curbs on abortion.
A spokesman for the Texas Attorney General’s Office said the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld requirements like those under fire in the lawsuit and affirmed the state’s interest “in safeguarding women’s health and protecting unborn life.”
“They are common-sense measures necessary to protect Texas women from unhygienic, unqualified clinics that put women’s lives and reproductive health at risk,” AG spokesman Marc Rylander said.
“It is ridiculous that these activists are so dedicated to their radical pro-abortion agenda that they would sacrifice the health or lives of Texas women to further it,” he said.
Biggs said pro-choice and pro-abortion are two different things.
She’s well aware that her pro-choice stance goes against some of her family members’ beliefs, she said.
“That’s the beauty of choice. If you don’t believe in it, don’t do it,” Biggs said. “But to take away the choice to be able to give your child … what you feel is love to do, I just don’t think that is lawmakers’ role to come in and interfere.”
Legislators’ concern seems to be limited, she said, noting state funding has decreased for people with disabilities.
“The caring seems to be while the child is in the mother’s uterus,” Biggs said. “But once this child is born, ‘Sorry, we don’t have the funds to do much to help you.’ ”