Category: It’s So Personal

A reader writes:

My wife and I are/were staunch choice advocates; we'd both done our share of marching on Washington for the cause. Actually enduring the process gave us a much more nuanced opinion about abortion.

For us, it was Trisomy 21 — Down Syndrome. The test came after my wife awoke one night in a pool of blood screaming and thinking she'd suffered a miscarriage. After she ran to the toilet, it fell upon me to call her doctor and then scoop out the remains–that actually turned out to be huge clots–and take them to the doctor the next day. The geneticist said that because of all the bleeding and other complications there was almost no chance the fetus would make it to 20 weeks let alone full term.

My wife says one of my finest moments as her husband came when I somehow made her laugh while she awaited the abortion. My wife doesn't talk about her feelings of the abortion and the "failed" pregnancy. But we've been together for more than a decade and I know she will always be crushed by it. I know we made the right decision for us but it still hurts badly. This was the son we would never have.

A reader writes:

I remember sitting in my bible study shortly after the Sept 11 attacks.  The women were discussing the horrible things Islamic terrorists do in the name of their God and their religion.  I was too private to let them know my experiences.

I ran three Plan Parenthood Clinics in the early 90s.  I worked for Planned Parenthood when Dr Gunn was murdered in Pensacola.

I had been followed home from work.  I had my car vandalized with pictures of aborted fetuses.  My nurses had to receive police escorts to their cars in our parking lots.  My office had rocks thrown through it.  The clinic had to be searched by bomb sniffing dogs one night after being broken into.  I received threats in the mail on a regular basis. My parents were always afraid I would be shot at going to work.

All this in the name of a Christian God and a Christian religion.  It was religious terrorism.  And it was US Citizen on US Citizen happening right here in our suburbs.

A Metafilter commenter writes:

My wife and I spent a week in Dr. Tiller's care after we learned our 21 week fetus had a severe defect incompatible with life. The laws in our state prevented us from ending the pregnancy there, and Dr. Tiller was one of maybe three choices in the whole nation at that gestational age.

My wife just called with the news of his murder, weeping. I can't really come up with some profound political statement just now, so let me just list some memories of Dr. Tiller.

I remember him firmly stating that he regarded the abortion debate in the US to be about the control of women's sexuality and reproduction.

I remember he spent over six hours in one-on-one care with my wife when there was concern she had an infection. We're talking about a physician here. Six hours.

He told the story of his previous shooting, where a woman shot him twice in both arms as he drove out of his clinic. At first he wanted to run her down with his Jeep, but then he thought "she shot you already George, she'll do it again!"

I remember being puzzled about a T-shirt he was wearing, which said "Happy Birthday Jennifer from team Tiller!" or something similar. Turns out it comemmorated the birthday of a fifteen year old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and came to Tiller for an abortion. As luck would have it, she was in the clinic the same week as her birthday. So the clinic threw her a party.

The walls of the clinic reception and waiting room are literally covered with letters from patients thanking him. Some were heartbreaking – obviously young and/or poorly educated people thanking Dr. Tiller for being there when they had no other options, explaining their family, church etc. had abandoned them.

I remember my wife, foggy with sedation after the final procedure, being helped from the exam table. He had her sit up and put her arms around his neck, and then he lifted her into a wheelchair. "You give good hugs" she whispered. He paused just for a moment. "You're just fine," he told her.

A reader writes:

Dr. Tiller's death – as any murder – is a great tragedy and subtracts something irrevocably from the human race. I don't want to dim the burning importance of this terrible event. But I feel I must make one important point. I disagree with late-term abortions in general, but late-term abortions for congenital cardiac defects are inexcusable. As a physician who specializes in taking care of children with these problems, I can categorically say that their care has improved immeasurably in the last decade.

A number of commenters have specifically singled out hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS). While it is true that, as late as 15 years ago, the two options for HLHS were heart transplant or what was referred to as "compassionate care", in the hands of a skilled surgeon and a modern cardiac intensive care unit, children with HLHS have a better than 50% chance of surviving through all three surgeries.

Yes, the surgeries are long and difficult, and the recovery periods are longer. This field is some of the most technical and demanding in all of children's health care. But 100% of fetuses on the receiving end of an abortion die. It is indisputably a sad and disheartening thing that people in this country ever feel compelled to resort to abortion after the age of viability. But it is even sadder when that decision is made on the basis of bad information.

A reader writes:

My brother and his wife received a diagnosis at the beginning of the second trimester's ultrasound that their child had anencephaly – a condition where the fetus' skull does not completely close and the brain forms partially outside the skull.  It is a neural tube defect, similar to spina bifida, but it happens higher up on the body. They were told the child would die before, or shortly after, birth. There was no doubt about the diagnosis. My brother and his wife were encouraged by their doctor to go to Kansas for an abortion, the closest place where they could obtain one in the second trimester. 
 
It was an agonizing decision, but they chose not to have the abortion for religious reasons.  The pregnancy went to term and the baby lived for several weeks.  She was surrounded by love for the brief time she was here. 

I wish I could say unequivocally that they made the right decision, but the long-term effects on my sister-in-law's mental well-being have been serious. She is very much changed from the person that she was before.

Imagine what it is like to walk around in your third trimester, obviously pregnant, while well-meaning people ask you about this baby that you don't expect to be taking home from the hospital. Innocuous comments become incredibly hurtful in this context. Then imagine the baby survives and days later you take home this child who will die. In case you might relax and pretend for a little while that everything is okay, a hospice nurse comes to your house every couple of days and reminds you the signs and symptoms of death. Every time you open the refrigerator you see the narcotics you've been given to ease the baby's suffering once things get really bad.
 
Eventually, this baby dies a grueling death in your arms and you go home to an empty house.  You want another baby, but are paralyzed by the thought of having another child with the same condition, yet you desperately want a child that is related to the child you lost. You find yourself unable to conceive and resentful of those who have many healthy children so easily. The infertility takes its toll on your marriage. The suffering and injustice takes its toll on your faith.
 
I often wonder what would have happened if they had the abortion. I'm not sure my sister-in-law could have lived with that decision, but at least she was given the gift of making a deliberate choice and this did make a difference in how my brother and his wife perceived their circumstances. How do people respond when they feel trapped?
 
I agree with those who believe abortion is a selfish choice, but in some cases the cost to the self is too high and the benefit to the other is too hard to determine. I'm afraid that the murder of Dr. Tiller will hasten the decline in doctors willing to do this work and deny desperate people of options.

A heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21.

A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we'd had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant. As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery. He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.

Our priest came away from that experience feeling that this world-renowned children’s hospital was basically experimenting on babies. He saw their futile suffering and likened it to being crucified. The family he had gone there to support later told him that if they had only known what their baby would be forced to go through before dying, they would never have chosen surgery. Our priest told us that he believed we were not choosing our son’s death, only choosing the timing of his death in order to spare him a great deal of suffering. Something he said that brought us great comfort was “God knows what is in your hearts.” God knows our choice was based on mercy and compassion. Who would better understand our hearts than God, who made the choice for His own Son to die?

Another reader on the reality of abortion:

We were told that the ultrasound suggested strongly that our second child would be born, if she made it that far, with a Trisomy 18 birth defect. There were cysts on her fetal brain that were indicative. Her death before birth or just after was highly likely. If she survived against the odds, it was almost certain that she would suffer from severe birth defects and profound developmental delays. Her short life would be taken up with corrective surgery and pain, none of which she would be able to understand but which she would suffer. The amniocentesis would let us know for sure.

There was that time while we waited when we had to decide what we would do if the news was bad. While my wife and I believe in a right to choose, we strongly feel that life is always the first choice if possible. Even so, we could not allow our daughter to undergo this. We would terminate our pregnancy and spare her. The news came back good and Meg is 16, wonderful and on her way to a career as an artist. It's not the decision that matters; it's why it's made. It's parents struggling through terrible choices. And their only hope and help is with the doctors. We are all struggling badly to find our way. Perhaps this is the fairest way to understand Dr. Tiller.

An earlier reader testimonial here. Illustration: Leonardo da Vinci.

A reader writes:

The murder of George Tiller reminds me of something about abortion that none of the advocates on either side get — it's intensely personal. My brother and his wife's first child, a girl, was diagnosed with hypoplastic left ventrical with an atrial complication. Look up the statistics, they are grim. They found the diagnosis at 18 weeks during the initial sonogram, almost at the cutoff point where most doctors not working in Kansas will perform abortions. (The nurse doing the sonogram blanched when she saw the abnormality, panicked and immediately called the doctor in to look.) So imagine the scenario. My brother and his wife have almost no information about the disease their firstborn child has other than the terrible mortality rates and the thought of having to bring a baby to term that will need three heart surgeries before her sixth birthday, each one of which could kill her. Or the baby could die in the womb. What do they do? The choice is unimaginable, and they have only a few weeks to decide. Only Kansas will allow doctors to abort fetuses after 20 weeks.

I guess my point is this… my brother and his wife chose to bring their daughter to term, though she died three days after being born, never being able to come off the heart-and-lung machine after her first surgery. But they considered having the abortion.

And if they took longer than two weeks to decide, George Tiller may have been the one performing the procedure. It's easy to take sides on abortion in the abstract because we only think of healthy babies. It's much harder when the decision is sitting in your living room in the form of a fetus with an 80+ percent fatal heart defect. Would George Tiller have been a monster if he aborted my niece? Or would he have saved my brother and his wife sixteen weeks of agony and the searing torture of handing their three-day-old child to doctors for open-heart surgery, knowing there was an 80% chance that was the last time they would see her alive?

I'm not making Tiller out to be a saint — he's not. I'm just saying that he was engaged in a legal, and sometimes helpful, practice and was murdered for it. There should be no rejoicing in his death.