The personal toll of anti-abortion laws
This is a very personal story about this photo. We’re celebrating my son Brian’s third birthday and I’m three months pregnant, and feeling joyful for getting past the first trimester.
My pregnancies were labeled “geriatric,” as anyone who has been pregnant past age 35 will tell you, which signifies high risk. Obstetricians said I was lucky there were no problems getting pregnant with Brian and delivering him full term — and perfectly healthy — at the age of 39/40.
I had gotten pregnant a second time when Brian was 18 months old, but began bleeding at six weeks. The obstetrician told me the pregnancy wasn’t viable and gave me medication to speed up its definite end and more quickly have a chance at another.
I was desperate to avoid the anguish of another miscarriage, and I was strongly encouraged to work with a reproductive endocrinologist for the next pregnancy in an effort to increase the likelihood of “success.” That meant frequent office visits for blood monitoring and giving myself shots to regulate ovulation and try to speed the maturity/health of the small, and finite, number of eggs I had left at my “advanced maternal age.”
We opted for artificial insemination, and were met with success. I remember at the 8-week checkup asking the obstetrician when I could stop worrying about miscarrying, and, having checked my and the baby’s vitals, she said: “about now.”
Then it’s six weeks later, Memorial Day weekend 2015, and my friend Megan captures me in a candid moment watching Brian and my nephews and niece playing in our driveway. I look at this photo every year, when the Facebook reminder pops up on my phone, and I don’t think my usual thoughts of: “Ugh, my arms are fat and my hair is stringy and I hate my smile when my gums show and look at that double chin.”
No, those automatic negative thoughts don’t surface. Instead, I think how happy and joyful I look watching our beautiful boy play with his sweet cousins while I grow his baby sister inside my amazing body. I think, now that was a perfect day.
Two days after that perfect day, I went for a routine anatomy scan, where I would communicate which, if any, genetic testing we would authorize on the baby in utero. My husband had offered to join me, but he had a busy day already planned and it seemed the next appointment would be
The technician rolls the ultrasound over my warmly lubricated abdomen, and there was silence, which I didn’t register in the moment.
a better one to attend as he would be able to “see more.”
I’m in the exam room; my small, already rounded, belly is exposed. I remember thinking how amazing it is that while pregnant with Brian, I didn’t “show” in the same way after just three months.
But the body is so smart, it remembers everything, and starts to take on the form of being with child sooner than the first time.
The technician rolls the ultrasound over my warmly lubricated abdomen, and there was silence, which I didn’t register in the moment. The technician said she needed to retrieve equipment from another exam room, and so I went to the bathroom. I’m washing my hands and the thought occurs to me: there was supposed to be sound, a heartbeat, which I heard at the eight-week checkup. I’m wracking my brain trying to remember how it was during my early pregnancy with Brian.
The technician returns with a transvaginal sonogram wand, and again, silence. The baby, which I would later learn was a girl, no longer had a heartbeat.
I laid in the room with no sound, expressionless, and a doctor arrived to express her sympathies and explain my options: to attempt to carry my dead child to term inside my ‘high risk” body, knowing I would give birth to a stillborn. Or to have a D&C to end the pregnancy. I chose Door No. 2, and she arranged the outpatient procedure for the next day.
The term, D&C stands for Dilation & Curettage. During the procedure, which is generally done while under general anesthesia, the doctor slightly dilates the cervix at the bottom of the uterus, and uses a thin instrument to remove fetal tissue.
I remember sitting in the pre-op room at Bridgeport Hospital with my wonderful then-husband dutifully holding my hand as I wailed for my mother, who had died 10 years earlier.
I don’t tell this story for sympathy. And I don’t often step up on the soapbox in a public manner. I’ve never been particularly comfortable with it, even having spent more than two decades as a journalist. My style tends to be more one of sharing things that speak to me and letting anyone paying attention make up their own mind.
But enough is enough. Can we please stop pretending that the abortion debate, and the Second Amendment debate, have anything to do with the preservation of life?
How is it that we, as a society, can so staunchly defend the rights of young, mentally ill men to shoot up schools and take the lives of children and yet give precedence to unborn children over their living,
breathing and most certainly anguished mothers?
Does anyone who knows me think I made the wrong decision by having that D&C, which in case you didn’t know, is an abortion? Would you have been comfortable forcing me to carry my dead baby girl in my body for six months because that was the law?
And don’t bother arguing that in my case, because there was no heartbeat, the point is moot. It’s not. It’s never an easy decision to surgically remove a child from your body. It’s a trauma. The degree of the trauma is measured by the individual as they experience it — no other person can decide how traumatic an experience is for someone else.
These issues are about power, control and a patriarchy — and to a lesser extent a brainwashed matriarchy — all righteous in their certainty.
I still get pangs of guilt and shame when Brian occasionally asks me why “I didn’t get him a brother.” He’s 10 now, and he gets lonely. Ask any woman with an only child how many times she’s been asked over the years … when’s the next one?
Seeing Roe v. Wade overturned is an absolute travesty for this country’s women. It means taking away the right to be in control of their bodies. It’s not something men have ever been expected to do.