Days before she ended her pregnancy, Joselin Linder was thrilled to imagine herself as a parent.
Linder is not a mother today, more than a year later, because she had an abortion at 10 weeks. She still wanted the child—wanted to call it George, perhaps—but she feared she would pass along the disease that killed her father in mid-life, practically fusing his organs and ballooning his body. She and her sister Hilary inherited the same unnamed illness, but as with most of the thousands of inheritable diseases known to science, there is no cure—except for stopping the affected bloodline.
It’s an agonizing form of prevention the Linder sisters have turned to four times combined.
Read the full, original story: To Catch a Killer Gene: Sisters Race to Stop Mystery Disease
