About the Book

Winner: Christianity Today 2019 Book Award, CT Women

Silver Medal, 2019 Illumination Awards

Happily married and teaching history at the University of Oxford, Sarah Williams had credentials, success, and knowledge. It took someone who would never have any of these things to teach her what it means to be human.

This extraordinary true story begins with the welcome news of a new member of the Williams family. Sarah’s husband, Paul, and their two young daughters share her excitement. But the happiness is short-lived, as a hospital scan reveals a lethal skeletal dysplasia. Birth will be fatal.

Sarah and Paul decide to carry the baby to term, a decision that shocks medical staff and Sarah’s professional colleagues. Sarah and Paul find themselves having to defend their child’s dignity and worth against incomprehension and at times open hostility. They name their daughter Cerian, Welsh for “loved one.” Sarah writes, “Cerian is not a strong religious principle or a rule that compels me to make hard and fast ethical decisions. She is a beautiful person who is teaching me to love the vulnerable, treasure the unlovely, and face fear with dignity and hope.”

In this candid and vulnerable account, Perfectly Human brings the reader along with Sarah on the journey towards Cerian's birthday and her deathday. It’s rare enough to find a writer who can share such a heart-stretching personal experience without sounding sappy, but here is one who at the same time has the ability to articulate the broader cultural issues raised by Cerian’s story. In a society striving for perfection, where worth is earned, identity is constructed, children are a choice, normal is beautiful, and deformity is repulsive, Cerian’s short life raises vital questions about what we value and where we are headed as a culture.

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Praise

It would be a mistake to characterize this book merely as a grief memoir. Williams shifts seamlessly between intimate reflections on love in the midst of tragic loss and incisive commentary on the social structures that framed her experience. … This is an important word for those of us wrestling with suffering and struggling for hope.

Christianity Today

If her parents had viewed Cerian as nothing more than a hindrance to her mother’s autonomy or a lesser sort of life because of her disability, then abortion would seem like the logical choice. But if you view Cerian as a fully human child, despite her disability, and believe that the natural law requires parents to love their children, then Paul and Sarah experienced the freedom of acting according to the given order of things, even though acting thus was painful and difficult. And in the midst of that action, they learned new things about the nature of love and what it means to be human.

Commonweal Magazine

Sarah Williamsshows us – and perhaps especially those in similar circumstances, having lost a child to miscarriage or stillbirth – that love can triumph even in such agonizing situations. Love remains love, and it remains infinitely precious, even if it’s given for only nine months and seared through with pain. If you haven’t read it, getPerfectly Human. Then give it away: Like love, it deserves sharing.

John Grondelski,
The Human Life Review

This is a wonderful, beautiful, heart-wrenching, healing book. We recommend it to everyone, and especially if you are facing or have faced a pregnancy with a child with a potentially fatal disability, or a miscarriage. An amazing book by an amazing woman.

Pregnancy Care Center of NY

A beautiful reminder of how individually specific the choice of whether to bring a pregnancy to term can be. Readers will be touched by Williams’s story of perseverance, faith, and love.

Publishers Weekly

This poignant book tells how a British husband and wife discover their unborn daughter has a catastrophic abnormality that will result in certain death. Against the advice of their doctors, they choose to carry the baby to term.… Sarah Williams describes how God drew near to them in their suffering. She notes the ways modern culture dehumanizes the unborn, de-emphasizes fathers, and delights in the perfect.

WORLD Magazine

One of the most profound, insightful, tender, sensitive, though-provoking books I have read in a long time.

Janet Parshall, Talk Show Host

Tablet of Contents

Tags:
Family and Parenting
Grieving
Culture of Life