[Jo Tweedy | Mailonline] An adopted woman has revealed how she was told she had survived the abortion that had killed her twin brother when she met her birth mother for the first time.
Mother-of-three Claire Culwell from Austin, Texas, was born to teenager mother Tonya Glasby, who was just 13 when she fell pregnant.
Glasby, now 47, assumed she was pregnant with just one child but doctors found that she had been expecting twins after she continued to feel movement a month after the termination.
Culwell survived the abortion attempt, although she weighed just 3lbs and was born two months’ prematurely with dislocated hips and club feet.
The 30-year-old, who has two adopted children and one biological child, says she was left staggered when she heard Glasby’s dramatic confession – when they reunited for the first time.
After being adopted at two months’ old by her parents Barbara and Warren Culwell, Culwell began to thrive – although the damage done to her body in the womb ensured health problems throughout her early childhood.
Her parents had adopted her believing that she’d simply been born early to a teenager mother, with no hint of the real story offered to them.
She told Fabulous Magazine: ‘I weighed just 3lbs at birth, having been born two months early and my hips on both sides were dislocated. My feet were both turned in. I was on life support for months.’
After growing up in a happy home, she was always given a positive story about her birth mother, being told frequently by her adoptive parents that she was a always ‘wanted’ baby.
At 20, Culwell decided that she wanted to meet her birth mother and, after several months tracking her down via an adoption agency, the family decided together that they should have a face-to-face reunion – unaware of the dramatic confession about to be made.
In March 2009, Culwell, by now 21, met her mother for the first time at the house of a friend in Texas.
The highly emotional meeting went well, with Culwell sharing photos of her childhood and thanking her for giving birth to her.
She’d written a card to her birth mother in advance, saying: ‘Thank you for choosing life for me… it’s the greatest gift I’ve ever received.’
After Glasby read the card, she broke down and began to confess the real story of Culwell’s birth, revealing that she was just 13 when she fell pregnant and that, after telling her family, they had decided she must have a termination.
[Editor’s Note: This article was written by Jo Tweedy and originally published at Mailonline. Title changed by P&P.]
