Late abortion is not a failure of contraception. It’s for medical reasons,” Eleanor Smeal, the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, who has worked to defend abortion providers like Tiller against harassment and violence since the mid-1980s, told me this week. “We’ve made pregnancy a fairy tale where there are no fetal complications, there’s no cancer, no terrible abuse of girls, no cases where to make a girl go all the way through a pregnancy is to destroy her. These are the realities of the story. That’s what Dr. Tiller worked with — the realities.The 9-year-old girl had been raped by her father. She was 18 weeks pregnant. Carrying the baby to term, going through labor and delivery, would have ripped her small body apart.
There was no doctor in her rural Southern town to provide her with an abortion. No area hospital would even consider taking her case.
Susan Hill, the president of the National Women’s Health Foundation, which operates reproductive health clinics in areas where abortion services are scarce or nonexisistent, called Dr. George Tiller, the Wichita, Kan., ob-gyn who last Sunday was shot to death by an abortion foe in the entry foyer of his church.
She begged.
“I only asked him for a favor when it was a really desperate story, not a semi-desperate story,” she told me this week. Tiller was known to abortion providers — and opponents — as the “doctor of last resort” — the one who took the patients no one else would touch.
“He took her for free,” she said. “He kept her three days. He checked her himself every few hours. She and her sister came back to me and said he couldn’t have been more wonderful. That’s just the way he was.”
Another story:
We had an ultrasound at 19 weeks and I should have known that something was wrong. The technicians took an exceedingly long time focusing on the bones, the femurs, the humerous, the skull. They moved me to a better machine and another technician and looked at those same bones again. Nobody was smiling. They let us look for only a minute and they didn't want to print us a picture or book another appointment.
The next day the doctor told us it was likely our little girl had a form of skeletal dysplasia "incompatible with life." I saw that the radiologist wrote "telephone receiver shape femurs" on the referral, and I google searched it when I got home. I studied developmental disabilities in university and I knew that there were lots of forms of skeletal dysplasia, some of which are not very limiting at all. But my heart sank when the only name that came up was Thanatophoric Dysplasia - death-bringing failure of growth. Thanatophoric dysplasia is only one amino acid difference from achondroplasia, a form of dwarfism with a normal quality of life. One amino acid. I couldn't look any more. We stayed up all night crying, with her moving and kicking all the while. How could a baby who kicks so much be so sick?
The next day the geneticist confirmed our fears. Yes, our little girl had this horrible condition. She had stunted skeletal growth with short arms and legs, a flattened spine, and a ribcage that would not grow to accommodate her lungs. She would die within hours, days, or weeks after birth from respiratory failure. Then came the dreaded choice. Carry to term and watch her die; run more tests to confirm the diagnosis, induce labor and then watch her die; do a D&C; or induce labor now.
Of course we loved her so very much, we didn't want her to suffer. My partner wanted more tests but I knew if we waited much longer she could be born alive, like a premature baby. I didn't want that. If she was to die I wanted it to be while she was still warm and cosy inside and not outside in the cold, gasping for air.
/snip
Now the most difficult task of somehow going on. Everyone else seems to want me to move on, to forget her, because "I could always have another baby." How I hate that sentence. Doesn't anyone know that I wanted THIS baby, I love THIS baby. She was her own person, unique and wonderful. It's so hard carrying this secret loss that no one wants to talk about with the added stigma that I "chose" this for myself. And of course there's the lingering feeling that I may not have done the right thing. Mothers are supposed to protect their babies, not terminate them. Wasn't I supposed to protect her from thanatophoric dysplasia too?http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/personal.html
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
