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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Lost amid the political and moral posturing over late-term abortions are the actual women who make the painful decision to undergo the procedure.
Jun 7, 2003 | For the first time since 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, the federal government is poised to restrict women's right to terminate their pregnancies. In early March, the Senate passed a bill to ban late-term, or what abortion opponents call "partial-birth," abortions. On Wednesday, the bill, HR-760, easily won the support of the House, with a vote of 282-139. Former President Clinton vetoed earlier versions of the ban, and the Supreme Court ruled three years ago that similar state bans were unconstitutional. But President Bush has promised he will sign HR-760 into law, making illegal a procedure that he has called "an abhorrent procedure that offends human dignity."
"Partial-birth abortion" is not a medically recognized term -- it's an expression born of politics. It refers to an abortion procedure called an "intact dilation and extraction" (D&X), performed in the second or third trimester, in which a physician partially delivers a fetus, punctures its head while it's still inside the mother, and then delivers it dead. Opponents say the procedure is tantamount to infanticide. Supporters argue that there are a host of reasons, both medical and psychological, why women need to have the right to have late-term abortions.
One of the key questions surrounding the controversy is why women have late-term abortions. Opponents claim that women, especially young women, often have them simply to get rid of unwanted pregnancies, while defenders argue that most women who have them do so because of health problems, including severe deformities with the unborn baby. The only thing clear is that the procedure is quite rare: According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI), an estimated 31 providers performed a total of 2,200 such procedures in 2000 (the most recent year statistics are available), a number that represents only 0.17 percent of all abortions performed that year. Beyond that, however, the data is inconclusive. A 1987 AGI study indicated that only 6 percent of women who had abortions after 16 weeks cited concerns for their own or their baby's health as the most important reason they had the procedure. But there is no current data to support that claim, and opponents of the bill -- including AGI -- claim the research is too outdated to have significance. In any case, many defenders of late-term abortions argue that the procedure should be legal whatever the reasons the woman may have, and that the issue has been seized on by abortion opponents as a beachhead to outlaw all abortions.
Easily forgotten amid the political posturing and endless moral arguments over late-term abortion are the real women who make what can be an agonizing decision to go through the procedures that HR-760 outlaws. Following are the stories of two such women, both of whose unborn babies suffered from severe health problems.
Kim, 34, New Orleans
My daughter existed for years before she was even conceived, a dark-curled, green-eyed gamine who spoke early, read early, delighted her parents with her inquisitiveness and intelligence. I saw her holding every stuffed animal, reading every children's book. I could look out a window and see her playing in the yard, tramping down the sidewalk from school, riding a bicycle down the street. My husband and I named her Kate the year we were married. My parents bought into the dream, too, my mother going so far as to buy the not-yet-born Kate books, even getting an autograph for her from Harper Lee. "To Kate," it read, in a fine script. "May you have a long and happy life." My brother framed the slip of paper, and they all gave it to me for our first married Christmas.
My husband at the time, Barry, was still researching his Ph.D. in Birmingham, Ala., and was years away from finishing and getting the job that would enable us to start our family. Those years were difficult ones -- waiting to start our future. But as soon as Barry graduated in 1996 with his computer science degree, we moved to Iowa. We thought it would be the perfect place to raise our family.
At 28, I became pregnant almost immediately, my first trimester a blur of nausea, exhaustion and anticipation. Barry and I were typical Type A parents-to-be: reading every book we could get our hands on, playing Mozart CDs. We considered ourselves well-informed, especially since my mother held a degree in early childhood development. But our routine ultrasound at 20 weeks -- which we hoped would confirm that Kate was indeed a Kate -- revealed shocking news. Our child suffered from anencephaly, a neural tube defect in which the brain doesn't develop past a very rudimentary stage. Essentially, our daughter's brain and skull were not there. We were heartbroken to learn that for all intents and purposes, there was no baby, no reason to continue the pregnancy.
The doctor's diagnosis came on Friday; on Monday, Barry and I drove to Iowa City, to the University Hospital's special gynecology clinic, to bring my pregnancy to an end. The clinic was in the basement of a building, tucked away on the college campus, and because this was less than a year after the shootings at the Planned Parenthood in Brookline, Mass., I remember we were surrounded by closed-circuit cameras, the reception area cased in bulletproof glass. The doctors did another series of ultrasounds and an amniocentesis to confirm the diagnosis. We wanted to know what was going on and so the doctors explained everything they could, from pointing out what was happening on the monitor to showing me the cloudiness of the amnio fluid.
As for the procedure itself, I don't remember much. I recall the faint sound of a vacuum and feeling some pressure as the doctors worked to extract the fetus, using speculums, curettes, forceps and suction. I don't know how long the fetus was intact; it could have been intact all the way into the birth canal. Unlike the step in the procedure that anti-choice activists like to present in graphic detail, there was no need to compress the skull. It was because my daughter's skull and brain had not developed that we had to have the procedure.
When I sit here at my desk and close my eyes and think about it, I can see the light on the clinic ceiling and feel Barry holding my hand as I cried. Not because what the doctors were doing frightened me -- the anencephaly had prevented our daughter's brain from developing enough to ever register consciousness so I knew she wasn't in pain -- but because I had just lost my child.
