I saw this in the Choice forum and felt it important to bring into GD so others who may not know can see what's really behind late-term abortions. The stigma and demonetization of these later-term decisions must end. What an awful story. The reality is that this IS the truth behind these types of decisions. Doctors and parents do not do this without reason and forethought and the best interests and compassion of all involved. I read right here on DU recently that choice is an "albatross" to the Democratic ticket. I refuse to believe that and I will not stand for it to be treated as a non-issue.
Peace to this family and all others like them. We MUST stop the attacks on these doctors and families.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24844532It took Mary Vargas six months and repeated hormone shots to get pregnant with her second child. “We were so excited,” Vargas, 35, remembers about the day she learned the treatments had worked.
“We wanted this baby with every fiber of our beings.” In February 2005, her husband brought a video camera to record their sonogram at almost 19 weeks, because, Vargas says, “we wanted to appreciate every moment of this child’s life.” The technician revealed they were having another son. But partway through the exam, she fell silent.
Concerned and scared, Vargas’s husband turned off the camera.
The sonogram showed that Vargas’s uterus contained almost no amniotic fluid, the essential liquid that cushions a fetus and enables the uterus to expand, giving him room to grow and develop. Without enough fluid, over the course of the pregnancy a baby would be crushed by the weight of the mother’s organs.
The mother makes amniotic fluid until midway through the second trimester; afterward, it mostly comprises fetal urine. There was a chance that Vargas had a tear in her amniotic sac that would repair itself and that her son would start making the fluid on his own. But the more likely scenario was a condition called Potter’s syndrome, essentially a failure to develop working kidneys. Only time and more tests would give the couple absolute answers.
“Our doctor took great pains to be reassuring,” recalls Vargas, a disability-rights attorney in Maryland. “It seemed that he was being too kind for things to be OK.” Even after another doctor gave her son only a 7 percent to 9 percent chance of surviving, and only then with severe disabilities, Vargas held on to hope. “We wanted that little boy under any terms,” she remembers tearfully.
But she didn’t want him to suffer. She knew that if he had Potter’s syndrome, those were terms she could not live with. After more than two weeks of bed rest, consultations and tests, another doctor did an amnioinfusion, filling Vargas’s uterus with fluid to provide better pictures of the fetus. A technician held the sonogram wand to her belly, and the Vargases and their doctor watched the results projected onto a monitor near the ceiling.
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Now nearly 22 weeks pregnant, Vargas had two choices: terminate immediately or wait, in which case she would miscarry at any point or spontaneously go into labor at as early as 28 weeks. If her son was still alive at his delivery, doctors warned, he would perish within a short time. And that death would likely be very painful for him. “As a parent, your job is to make sure your child doesn’t suffer unnecessarily,” she says. “He had no chance at life. What we had to think about was how he was going to die. It wasn’t about choice, because the option we wanted — to have our baby — was no longer available.”
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