The ethical quagmire of a fetus-harming epilepsy drug

When hannah mulcahy was 14 she had what she calls “the big, bad one”: the kind of seizure everyone imagines when they think of epilepsy. But her doctors hesitated to give her sodium valproate, a highly effective drug, because it could harm the fetus should she become pregnant. Ms Mulcahy instead spent years on drugs that did not prevent her seizures; her mental health and schooling suffered. “It felt like my unborn, imagined child was more important than I was,” she says, now 20 and, thanks to valproate, seizure-free.