(no subject)
It's four months today since my D&E procedure. Despite the fact that I've been fairly consistently bombarded with nasty comments from anti-abortion bigots (on another forum), I'm still convinced I made the right decision. It's not so much a story of my abortion as it is a story about what it's like to terminate a wanted pregnancy after a prenatal diagnosis shows drastic and fatal abnormalities.
My situation was a little bit different than most of the people who post here. I got pregnant intentionally, because my husband and I wanted a baby. After prenatal testing, however, the results indicated that the pregnancy wasn't viable due to a chromosome abnormality. 80% of pregnancies with this abnormality (Trisomy 13) end in late-term miscarriage or stillbirth. If I was part of the 20% that have a live birth, I'd give birth to a dying baby with a malformed heart that was missing major parts of the brain and had other serious physical problems. Most of the 20% who are born alive die within six months, even with constant medical intervention.
To tell you the truth, the decision wasn't one that I spent a lot of time agonizing about. The thought of risking my life and possibly my future fertility to give birth to a baby that was going to be dead or dying wasn't something that made a lot of sense to me. But it was hard. We'd waited for a while to try to have a baby, because my health isn't great, and it took us some time for me to get pregnant. I felt a tremendous amount of guilt - not that I was having an abortion, because that was the least selfish choice I could make, but because I couldn't produce a viable pregnancy. My body failed me, and that's something I'm still dealing with.
We told our immediate family what was going on - my husband's mother and my father, since we're both members of single-parent families. We told close friends the truth as well. Largely, however, I told people that I'd lost the baby, mostly because I was in an emotional place where I couldn't handle criticism of our decision to terminate.
On November 11, I went for a D&E. I was 14 weeks pregnant. The laminaria insertion was more painful than the actual procedure, and the hospital staff and doctor were very kind to me.
As time has gone on and the pain of losing this pregnancy has dulled a bit, I've gotten more open about what happened. Unsurprisingly, I've gotten a lot of hostile comments and responses from people who think that I should have gone through with the pregnancy. Because any life, even a life measured in minutes, is more important than me. I'm just an incubator, these comments tell me. A vehicle for a fetus to develop in, a fetus that has more value to them than I do. They tell me I had an abortion because I hate the disabled, because the child wasn't "perfect," because I'm selfish.
They're wrong.
I did the kindest thing I could do, under the circumstances. I ended suffering before it could begin. I know that.
I belong to a number of support forums for women who've termianted after a poor or fatal prenatal diagnosis. It consistently amazes me how often people post rude, intrusive comments. These are women who have often gotten to 20 to 24 weeks of pregnancy before they learn their baby is developing without a brain. Or that the fetus' organs are all on the outside of the body. Or that the fetus is developing while fused to the uterine wall. Or that it has no organs. Or any one of a million different ways a pregnancy can go horribly, tragically wrong. These are the people who have late-term abortions. Not because they're selfish, not because they're lazy, but because they make a heartbreaking choice to end the pregnancy rather than let their child live a short life filled with terrible suffering.