While all the fabulous ladies on Lifetime’s Little Women: LA seemed to be trying for babies, Terra Jole, the one who didn’t think she was ready for kids, got pregnant first. She and her long-time boyfriend Joe soon settled into the idea, but they still faced some uncertainty about the health of their child since they both suffered from kinds of dwarfism.
Dwarfism is caused by dominant genes, and when two little people get pregnant, their baby has a 25% of chance of being of normal height and proportion, a 50% chance of being a little person, and a 25% of suffering from something called double dominance syndrome, which is deadly most of the time. There is currently an infant born in the U.K. last March who is defying the odds, but it’s still a precarious situation.
Terra and Joe thought they may have been out of the woods because they have difference forms of dwarfism, but their OB/GYN informed them their child still has 25% chance at the problems double dwarfism causes (usually the child is just too small to develop properly and survive.)
Terra has said that she doesn’t want to have an abortion if she finds out their child is double-dominant, but she’s torn. “If the results of the test come out that the child is double-dominant, and I decided to go with the abortion, people would say I’m going to hell. If I decide to go through with the pregnancy with the double-dominant child, and the child lives a couple of hours, a couple of days, I feel like I would torture this child. If it can’t breathe, if it can’t live life, so I feel like I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
Terra is now six months along in her pregnancy, so hopefully that means everything is going ok. “Since the beginning it’s been a crazy whirlwind, which you’ll definitely see throughout the show. There are things that I found out about the pregnancy that I didn’t know previously,” Terra said in a recent interview with SheKnows.com.
