"I was offered a .22 bullet, although I'm still not sure whom he meant it for, me or my child. One man took me up on the challenge I'd posed in the thread and declared that my son just wasn't worth keeping alive anymore. There was even a percentage of the comments dedicated to the belief that I was a foreigner or, worse, a terrorist, which is when I started asking news outlets to use my full name, Alison, not Ali, since people seemed unable to believe that I was in fact a white chick from New Jersey.

The worst were the ones who attacked on the genetic front. Heterotaxy has no known cause, but in our case it was due to a genetic glitch, a previously unknown fault in the code of my own humanity that I passed down to my son. I don't think I'll ever come to terms with the fact that it was me who slipped the poison into his DNA, with knowing that his children (if he ever has them) will stand in front of this same 50-50 firing squad. It's been my own private heartbreak. Now strangers were tearing barely healed scabs off those old wounds and I was running out of hands to stanch the bleeding.