Category: It’s So Personal

A reader writes:

My twins were delivered at 29 weeks and 3 days because I had severe high that there was a risk the boys’ oxygen supply would be cut off, leading to brain damage. 

So I had a C-section.  The boys were in the NICU for 9 weeks. Owen in particular had a hard time; he was on oxygen and IV for a long while, had a heart murmur, and aspirated his milk.  Retinopathy  affected both boys, so they both wear glasses and always will.  Oliver had surgery for a couple of hernias.  They are now three and speech delayed, so we're going through testing to determine if they're autistic.
 
The reason I give you a brief outline of my boys' birth and development is because they were born nearly six weeks after a fetus is considered “viable”.  To be perfectly honest, I don’t view my children as having been viable when they were born; I couldn’t feed them by mouth (the suck/swallow reflex doesn’t develop until at least 35 weeks), they couldn’t breathe on their own, their digestive systems didn't work properly, they couldn't regulate their body temperature (having no body fat), etc, etc.

In the abstract, I would say I am pro-choice, but an abortion was not something I could personally choose. I certainly treasure my children regardless of the challenges they continue to face.  But as your readers have demonstrated, abstract concepts become difficult to apply in the face of deeply personal circumstances.  One of the abstract concepts that is too often bandied about is the idea that at a certain number of weeks a fetus is suddenly viable. But my 29-week babies were not viable at all without massive medical intervention.  Regardless of its gestational age, a fetus that is faceless or only has a brain stem is clearly not capable of sustaining life.  So why do the number of weeks that have passed since conception determine whether the pregnancy can be terminated or not?
 
There are no legal limits on abortion in Canada.  The law that governed abortion was overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1988 and nothing has taken its place.  I personally think that’s a shame, because I’d like to see a public discussion of what we as a nation think is appropriate with respect to abortion and I’d like to see some guidelines in place.  Having said that, abortion rates have been steadily declining in Canada and are now lower than the U.S. (97,254 abortions in 2005 compared with births of 364,085), so maybe we are doing something right. 

It seems to me that rigid formulas determining what options are available based solely on gestational age totally miss the point – you can’t just plug the data into a flowchart and ascertain the appropriate outcome.  This is personal, and the best system is one that assists mothers in coming to the decision that’s right for them.

Many readers have asked us to compile the various late term abortion testimonials we published this week (which are only a fraction of the ones we've received). Here they are, in chronological order:

It's So Personal
It's So Personal, Ctd
The Catholic Mother
The Trauma
A Doctor's View (reader reaction)
A Target Of Terror
The Regret
Not Knowing For Sure
When Principle Meets Reality
Serial Abortions (reader reaction)
Preparing For The Worst
An Unforgiving Family (reader reaction)
The Guilt
Holding On
The Gay Fathers
What Guilt?
Ectopic "Miscarriage"

Still more to come. (And maybe a bound collection? We're actively thinking of it, prompted by many reader requests. But this should be a useful link for now.)

A reader writes:

My heart goes out to the  pregnancies don't last. They aren't in the uterus. They simply don't go to term, except in extremely rare and bizarre cases. You have one choice: seek treatment immediately. Or wait for a natural miscarriage and risk major abdominal surgery, infection, infertility, and death. The baby will not live regardless.

I had an ectopic pregnancy scare in January. (It turned out to be a run-of-the mill none-ectopic miscarriage.) My doctor didn't hesitate to tell me to take a chemotherapy drug that ends the pregnancy. But she didn't use the word "abortion." No obstetrician would consider ending an ectopic pregnancy an abortion. No pro-life obstetrician would refuse to treat one and send you off to Planned Parenthood. They would consider it a medical necessity — a treatment of a life-threatening illness.

Ectopic pregnancies are extremely common, and I've known pro-life woman who have had them and had them treated without hypocrisy. It would sicken me if a woman was that twisted about abortion rights that she would risk death to save a six-week old fetus that CANNOT be saved.

My advice to this woman: next time you have an ectopic pregnancy, tell your family that you are having a miscarriage. That's the truth. But don't expect them to feel for you. Women who have miscarriages are the great silent minority in America. It's not acknowledged. Many people don't understand why I sank into a deep depression after mine. To many pro-life advocates it's only a baby if it's aborted by man. If God aborts it, they simply don't care. If you want evidence of this, try to find one song about the loss of a child by miscarriage. There's exactly one — a country song – and many radio stations BANNED it because it smacked too much of abortion. The twisted irony astounds me.

A reader writes:

I cannot help but think you are cherry-picking your printed stories, highlighting those who have had enormous difficulty with abortion, simply because you yourself have difficulty with abortion.  
 
Here is my own story. I got pregnant when I was 22 by my then-fiance (now husband).  I was, at that time, not ready to be a parent.  I certainly could have done it, but I wasn't personally ready. And to me, if I'm not ready to have a child, I should not have one.  Children are a big responsibility – not one that one should assume just because they got unlucky one night.
 
After I took the store-bought test, I immediately scheduled an abortion (which was a trick, since I had no privacy at work).  First, I called a place I whose ad appeared to be offering abortions ("Pregnant?  Don't want to be?  Call us").  I didn't know about fake pro-life pressure clinics at that time (aka "crisis pregnancy centers").  They didn't tell me their agenda, just scheduled me for an appointment. But I could tell something was weird, so I canceled it.  I only later discovered that they put out misleading ads to trick women.  I think trying to trick desperate, pregnant women is about as shady as one can get.

My fiance drove me to the hospital on the day of the abortion. I was quickly examined, then given an ultrasound to make sure I was really pregnant. Unlike your previous reader, who felt that someone should have forced upon him some kind of waiting period or something, I think such measures are both disingenuous and disrespectful.  Obviously waiting 24 hours would not have magically made him a better person, dedicated to his girlfriend's welfare and desireous of a child.  It's not the state's job or the clinic's job to make him do whatever he now thinks is the right thing.

I chose to have a medication abortion (as opposed to surgery). At that time, methotrexate was used.  Medication abortions are basically an induced miscarriage.  A lot of the "orientation" that the kindly woman in the conference room gave me consisted of explaining to me how this could hurt a LOT and I could bleed a LOT.  It's essentially a lesser form of labor, and can be scary if you are not prepared.  For me, it definitely was very painful.  BUT – I have since gone through labor twice, and I can safely say that labor is MUCH worse.  I am always bemused when people say "abortion is painful and bloody" to deter abortion.  Like birth is somehow not painful and bloody?  

Since then I've been fine. A few nostalgic moments.  I've never cried about it.  I am not sad about it. It was the right decision.  Life goes on.  People do not tend to spend the rest of their lives wallowing in guilt and misery because they terminated a pregnancy.  They go to school, they fall in love, they get married, they have children.  One out of every three women in America has had or will have an abortion at some point.  The stories of ongoing misery that you are choosing to print are the extreme outliers.

We do not cherry-pick these emails. This thread began by dealing with late term abortions, and why they occur. And we did our very best to provide the broadest range of experiences and viewpoints we could.

A reader writes:

I'm not sure I feel comfortable having the all the details shared on the website, but I wanted to give you another story, this time from the point of view of gay fathers.

We had had a difficult road with our surrogacy, but by the 20th week, everything looked great — all of the tests and previous ultrasounds on the twins had been fine, the pregnancy had been easy, and we had (and have) a wonderful relationship with our surrogate and her family. We had flown halfway across the country to be with them for a week to celebrate, and plan the baby shower.

Then out of nowhere, a nightmare. The technician brought us into the doctor's office, where he delivered the news that one of the twins had a grievous birth defect, one that would not only doom her to a short life of pain and suffering, but also one that would endanger the development and delivery of the other twin and the health of our surrogate. We were in the Midwest, and the specter of having to brave the protesters in Wichita was more than we thought we could put her through (or take ourselves). So we made arrangements to fly everyone home with us for the procedure, and hope that our other child would be OK.

I grieve every day. I agonize over the decision we made, yet I know it was the right one. I know because as I bring this to a close, my infant daughter is waking up and needs her bottle, and seeing her smile up at me lets me focus on the now and the future, and not the sadness of what might have been. As one of your other readers who shared her story remarked, it's an intensely personal choice best made by individuals; we all had that same primal feeling that as painful and as heart-wrenching as it was, the four of us (my partner and I, our surrogate and her husband) had made the right decision.

A reader writes:

My wife and I had our lives forever changed by an unexpected pregnancy that began one year ago, almost to the day. It was to be our first child, Zoey, and we were both very scared in the beginning. Everything had gone perfectly, when nearly four months into the pregnancy, we paid a routine visit to the hospital for an ultrasound session. The doctor's face all of a sudden became grave, and he told us that not all was well.

Zoey had what is called a cystic hygroma, a buildup of fluid on the backside of the neck. These can, in some cases, go away, but in other cases they can grow, leading to hydropsy, which can cause the baby to die or be born in a severely handicapped state. Hers was a severe case. I will never, ever be able to forget those minutes inside the doctor's office. They were the longest and most heart-rending of my life, and exponentially so for my wife. The pregnancy had forever changed our lives to begin with, and now everything had changed even more drastically.
 
In Korea, where we live, there really is no social issue regarding the rights and wrongs of abortion. The common phrase for aborting in Korea is to 'erase' a child, generally used in cases of pregnancy outside marriage, and this well illustrates the no-issue attitude held by the majority of the nation's people. Virtually every OB/GYN clinic is an abortion clinic, and the procedures are as easy to get as anything. Further, hospital staff put great pressure on mothers to abort in cases of abnormality, big or small. This was our experience.

We returned to the clinic in a few days as instructed to repeat the ultrasound and monitor the cystic hygroma, and it had grown even in that short time. The doctors immediately began to prepare for the abortion without even so much as asking my wife what her choice would be, and she had to stop them. Then things got ugly.

Their attitude became extremely rude, and they condescendingly asked if we had a religious reason for resisting the abortion. My wife calmly explained to them that we're Jehovah's Witnesses, and that we only see abortion as a choice when the mother's life may be in danger. At this point, the staff gave up, and sent us away without so much as an encouraging word.

We began to have personal doubts as to what to do, feeling torn apart. If the child was sure to die, then wouldn't the most merciful path be to end its life before it began to suffer? This was something we had to grapple with very painfully, but we prayerfully decided that it would not be right for us to end the child's life. There are a great many Jehovah's Witnesses in Korea, but only the top hospitals in the country respect our beliefs, often having staff who specialize in dealing with us. One prestigious hospital, in particular, is famous for this, and we immediately sought it out and were connected with the senior OB/GYN specialist.

He clearly laid out the situation to us, and deeply respected my wife's right to do as she chose from day one. There was little chance for our daughter to survive to birth, and even if she would, she would likely either die soon thereafter or have to live with major problems. Our sadness didn't go away, but it was indescribably comforting to be understood and respected. Over the next weeks, we began to come to terms with our baby's situation, relying on God for strength and praying for the most merciful outcome, whatever that would be. My mother in-law came and stayed at the house to help my wife, which is a nice Korean custom, especially if you have a wonderful mother in-law. It was a time of great fear, but we learned to cope, and little by little, we were overcome by a deep peace of mind.
 
And then we actually got to know Zoey. She began to kick, she began to jump whenever she heard music, and she exhibited all the signs of being a completely happy baby, just as she had all along. She was an absolute joy. But every time we went back to the hospital, the doctor's expression would be that much more grave, and his tone that much more somber, explaining to us that her hydropsy was worsening, but that her heart was unusually strong.

Three months went by, and I can tell you without a doubt that they were the happiest three months of our lives. We treasured each moment we spent with Zoey, knowing that our days with her were numbered. There were a great many tears, and there was indescribable sadness, but there was an incredibly deep tranquility and peace of mind that transcended it all. 
 
Later in November, Zoey died. Her heart held out for an exceptionally long time considering her condition, but the time had come when it could beat no longer. My wife told me one day that she knew it had happened. We packed up her things and went to the hospital, and within ten hours she was in labor, giving birth, but with a great void in her heart where the joy of a new mother was supposed to be. It was crushing, but there was peace in knowing that Zoey's life ended mercifully in the womb. And there is indescribable peace in the belief that we will someday be reunited with her again. It's been a long and slow road to recovery, but my wife is doing well. We went to Hawaii in February to scatter the baby's ashes in a beautiful, untouched place, and were able to find a great deal of closure.
 
I'm not saying anything about anyone else here or what they've done — I learned firsthand the indescribable sadness and torment of being told your child in the womb has a life-threatening condition, and my heart goes out to any and all parents who've had to deal with such a situation. But the decision we made to keep our baby alive was the very best thing we could have ever done. My wife and I got to know the greatest love of our life, and it changed us forever in ways I can't even begin to express.

A reader writes:

Thanks for your stories from the families that went through agonizing choices. I come from a family of Christianists. They may have started out Christians, but I think the abortion debate started them on a path away from the followings of Jesus to the followings of some fairly wacko evangelicals. I respect them for holding on to beliefs that they cherish, but I found over time my respect for them, as thinking and supposedly loving human beings, has diminished. I married late, at age 40, and my husband and I had no plans for children. As we were waiting for his vasectomy to “kick in”, using condoms, I somehow became pregnant. Ultrasound revealed that the pregnancy was ectopic. I was not well, feeling sick and in pain every day. There are extreme risks to the health of the mother in allowing an ectopic pregnancy to come to term.

I would have kept the whole issue to myself and not shared it with my family if it hadn’t have just so happened to coincide with a long-planned family reunion. I had to give a reason to not attend the reunion so I decided to share my predicament with my family. I chose to terminate at six weeks. My family heartily disagreed, saying that it was my duty to risk my life for a pregnancy I never wanted and had taken rational steps to avoid. This happened in 2007 and my tenuous relations with my family have not recovered. It still is a profoundly deep hurt that aches within me that my family felt that it would be proper for me to die rather than take the medical procedure that would save my life. My family seems to value the six week of cell growth over the person they have known for 40 years. Birthday wishes seem hollow; them checking in with me to see how I am doing seems hypocritical of them since they all would have chosen that I die, along with the fetus, during a painful ectopic pregnancy.

My story is nothing compared to the stories of women who were carrying faceless babies, babies with no brain development, or even dead babies and the mothers were unable to find medical help except by traveling to Kansas to obtain a late-term abortion. Your line “I still cannot in good conscience support these abortions” sends me right back to holding the phone and listening to my mother, sisters, father and a brother in law tell me that I was damning myself by choosing to save my own life rather than risking my life and the unborn fetus’ life by utilizing modern medicine. If the anti-choice position is supposed to be “pro-life”, I cannot understand how my actions, saving my life, don’t fall under that same rubric.

I have valued your open-mindedness and that you challenge your long-held beliefs as new evidence arises and that you have the courage to occasionally change your views as facts change. But I cannot wrap my mind around you reading these accounts and still believing that the right course of action for these mothers, and for me, was to risk their lives or bring into being children that will not have one day of fully lived life; that the right course of action would be to impoverish their entire families by committing themselves and their budgets to impossible medical bills with no hope of finding a healthy baby at the end of their efforts.

I have to say I am beginning to believe that these abortions, given their excruciating moral and personal choices, may be the most defensible in context of all abortions. And yet they seem to be taking life in a more viscerally distressing way. I need time to think and rethink these things. I would not have without reading these extraordinary accounts.

A reader writes:

My third pregnancy resulted in the birth of twin girls – one with horribly deformed internal organs and the other normal.  I had chosen not to have testing done, because although I believed in the right to choose, I did not think I would ever choose abortion for myself.  The doctors wanted to do surgery on our daughter that held a 10% chance of survival and promised another decade of surgeries for a child whose disability would leave her blind, mute and severely mentally retarded.  We had to make the excruciating decision of whether to allow that course of events.  We chose to baptise and let her return to God.  We held her as she died three hours later.  Her sister, blessedly, survived after a 2 month stay in neo-natal intensive care.

The struggle and torment of burying and grieving for a child, and explaining to the three older siblings why we only brought home one baby, was an ongoing horror that lasted years.  It took a huge toll on our marriage for a long time.  The next time I got pregnant, I was terrified.  Your odds of having a child with birth defects goes up with age and previously affected children.  I did not want to be blindsided by another child dying in my arms.  I did not think my family would survive another experience like that intact.

I decided to have every test they offer this time.

I found out that I would get the amniocentisis results with only six days to decide and procure termination should I have another child with a life ending abnormality.  Six days.  If I struggled with indecision too long I would have to travel to Kansas.  Being unwilling to put my family through that situation again, I had the number of the clinic ready to make the appointment immediately if my amnio revealed another child doomed to suffer or die.  This time, thankfully, I had one healthy baby girl. 

What happened to Tiller is a crime.  What is also a criminal is that we already have a nation where women are forced into scenarios where all the choices are bad and made worse by the lack of freedom handed unequally to our gender in being able to access a doctor and determine what is right for our children and our families. This is Terry Schaivo territory.  If the Christianists ever succeed in completely outlawing abortion, women in my situation will be forced to watch our newborns gasp their last breath and grow cold in our arms.

A reader writes:

Twenty-seven years ago I went to the ER after having suffered my fourth miscarriage.   After genetic screening, my husband had previously been diagnosed with a chromosal defect which would result in the spontaneous abortion of about 50% of our conceptions (actually, more like 66).  It's called a balanced reciprocal translocation, and the anomaly is so severe that the fetus dies within about 12 weeks of conception.  We managed to eventually have a son and daughter, but both are carriers who will in turn someday face the same daunting experiences we endured.    
 
Anyway, back to the ER.  As I was registering to get my D and C [dilatation and curettage], a woman barged in the front door demanding an abortion immediately.  The attendant told her she would have to wait her turn, to which she responded that she'd already had six abortions and it was no big deal, couldn't they just rush her case a little since she had several more appointments to keep that day. 

What a contrast we presented.  One woman who was devastated by the loss of four babies countered by a woman who could so blithely give up one after another. My daughter is getting married this summer and, as I said before, she is a carrier.  They will have to undergo genetic testing to confirm what we already know, and that is she will most likely have to endure the heartbreak of numerous miscarriages. 
 
I am a firm believer in a woman's right to choose to abort, but there must be a sane limit to the ability to obtain an obscenely large number.  And it's difficult to envision the circumstance where the need to have such a late-term procedure would be truly justified.

A reader writes:

 About a year ago, my cousin went into have an abdominal hernia fixed.  She was born with kidney problems that required multiple abdomen surgeries, which led to scarring and fibrous growths on her uterus that resulted in three complicated pregnancies. Just hours before she was scheduled for the operating room, the surgeon realized he had not conducted a pregnancy test. Despite using birth control, my cousin had somehow gotten pregnant. Considering her history and condition, the surgeon did not believe it was wise to bring the child to term. He believed she would probably miscarry without at least six months of bed rest, and that she would risk not only her health but possibly her life. She got a second opinion from another doctor who believed that he could safely help her bring the child to term, though it would be a very complicated pregnancy.

My Catholic, Republican, generally "pro-life" sister and mother related this to me at the time. My cousin had not yet decided what she would do, but my sister was certain: if she were my cousin, with three children under five years old who needed a mother to raise them (and a father who traveled often and for long periods for work), she would have terminated the pregnancy. I, on the other hand – a gay liberal pro-choice Democratic male – sensed I wouldn't have been able to go through with an abortion. I would have felt devastated thinking about having ended the possible life of my own child.

It turned out my cousin felt the same way. My aunt and uncle flew from New Jersey to Seattle and took care of their three grandchildren while my cousin remained in bed. She gave birth to another beautiful girl. Having learned to temper my tendency to engage in political arguments with my Republican family, I never revisited with my sister what she said she would have done in that situation. Nevertheless, I doubt she would ever admit that despite her professed pro-life Catholicism, she actually believes in the right to an abortion.