One of the most sickening and infuriating things about carrying a baby with anencephaly is that the medical community views these babies as brain dead and with a lack of “personhood” (the quality or condition of being an individual person). Often times this leads to a push to offer these babies up for organ donation, as if to say they can live on in another’s baby. Here’s the problem with that logic, these babies are individual people with likes and dislikes, they may be missing parts of their brains, but they are still people and any mother who has carried one of these babies will testify to that. If they are born alive, they are often cognizant (although they may lack the ability to communicate), and they are absolutely not brain dead, or vegetative.