Don’t We All Have An “Abortion” Story?

There is the potential for a lot of triggers in this post. I am going to put this disclaimer up on top with a warning to you as you proceed that I’m letting you into my life more than I normally would in writing on the internet. Stop reading if you are “pro-life” and find other schools of thought unbearable. Be warned that there are triggers for people with fertility challenges or pregnancy loss. If you are afraid of knowing the stats on some pregnancy-related things, now might be a great time to stop reading. 

I am writing this post and “letting you in” to my thought processes because these conversations about these huge upcoming changes to reproductive rights need to be had. I am sorry in advance if this post changes your opinions of me as a person, mother, friend, professional, or human in a negative way. I am hoping if we don’t agree, we can agree to disagree and hold space for each other. I have literally sat on this post for months because of my uncertainty in posting it, but decided to proceed because its such an important topic to talk about.

I have loved babies since I was a baby. If I could birth a dozen babies, I would. If I could foster all the infants and toddlers that needed a loving home, I would. When I hear someone is pregnant, I have this immediate impatience to meet and snuggle their child. If a person tells me they (or their partner) are pregnant, I am immediately 25% – 50% more interested in their life. If you are looking for me at an event, look at the kids’ table or for the fussy baby, and I’m probably there supervising or soothing. I am letting you see my neurodivergence here. Please do not judge. I just like tiny humans more than the average person…take that sentence how you’d like.

I am sharing this love of children because I am very much in support of bringing babies into the world. I also want all the children born to live safe, happy, healthy lives. Sadly, sometimes these two things cannot coincide. When looking at the statistics, the children that are currently alive and in our country are not all living lives where they have parents able to properly care for them and provide basic needs like food, clothing, and shelter.

It is my opinion that we should not make people who cannot afford to care for babies, have babies. Annually, there are half a million children in foster care in the United States. About 8.4% of United States children are food insecure, which means they do not know if they will have enough food or when their next reliable meal will be. In the US, 1 in 7 children experience child abuse or neglect. The bottom line is that we have a lot of children in the United States who are hungry, without parents, or with parents who cannot take proper care of them. We do not need to force more people to have babies they do not want, or babies that they may want, but literally cannot care for. 

We also need to be considering that sex is an activity of daily living and a natural process. I hear people say things like, “Poor people should just not have sex, and then they would not have this issue of unwanted pregnancy.” It is not fair or reasonable to ask people to abstain from sex indefinitely just because they cannot afford to have children. Childcare is freaking expensive. Honestly, most of us cannot afford an active sex life based on those standards.  If we provide accessible and affordable health care, sex education, and birth control methods, the amount of unplanned pregnancy will decrease. Forty-five percent of pregnancies are unplanned! We can do a lot to change that without a huge amount of effort. We need to keep those services available to all people, not take them away or make them difficult to access. 

Next comes the issue of medical necessity. When I see signs like, “Stop killing babies,” and “Abortion is murder,” I have so many thoughts. My first snarky one is, “But it is 100% OK to kill moms and resultantly kill those babies.” But seriously, why is it OK to let the carriers of these fetuses literally die because of a lack of a basic, medically necessary procedure? I have seen so many on-point memes and Tweets, but the one that stuck with me went like this…

“The treatment for ectopic pregnancy is abortion.

The treatment for a miscarriage that the body won’t release is abortion.

If you can’t get those abortions, you die.

You. Die.” @elizabethlgr

If you did not know anything about ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage, this may not feel super “close to home” for you. Let me give you some perspective. Ectopic pregnancy is a medical emergency. One in fifty pregnancies in the United States are ectopic. An ectopic pregnancy can cause excessive bleeding or a rupture of the area of attachment. An ectopic pregnancy is NEVER viable. Again, ectopic pregnancy ALWAYS leads to pregnancy loss and leads to death of the parent if untreated. One in four people with a uterus will experience a miscarriage. The risk of experiencing a subsequent miscarriage after a first increases by 20%, after a second to 28% and after a third to 43%. Seventy-one percent of these will need some medical intervention, with 29% needing surgery…aka “abortion.” With too many regulations to abortion and related medical procedures, these gestational carriers will literally be left to die. I had made a comment about this being a slipper slope but my lovely cousin and legal expert had the following to say!

“In states with a total Abortion ban or fetal heartbeat laws, D&C as treatment can only be performed if no fetal heartbeat is detected. So even if the fetus is not viable the procedure cannot be performed until after the heartbeat has completely stopped. This can lead to toxemia and the death of the mother. Also some of the states with a total ban DO NOT have an exception for the life or health of the mother. The slippery slope has begun.”

What about the parents who are pregnant with a baby who will not make it? With a child that is missing a fundamental part of their being, whether that be an arm, a part of the spinal cord, or brain? A child that will be born to a life of severe disability, severe pain, and/or a terrible quality of life? People LOVE to tell stories about the miracles, the exceptions, the times that the doctors were wrong. Stories about how parents ignored the doctor’s recommendations and birthed a healthy baby. Please know that this is the exception, not the rule. I am all for healthy babies and happily-ever-afters, but sometimes, that is not the way the pregnancy goes. Fetal science and medicine is very advanced.  There is a lot of information to be gathered about an unborn child, and it’s pretty accurate. I know that I would never want to make a child suffer, and these new laws can prevent having a choice in that situation. 

If you are still here and you are thinking, “But Mora, the people who have to have abortions are different than you and me,” I am here to tell you, they are not. If you search your soul, I’m sure you have a time you have to consider abortion for yourself or someone very close to you. I work with individuals every day who have made the choice to have an abortion (or not!) whether it was the easy one to make or hard to make. I had written another 6 paragraphs about the times we’ve had conversations about abortion in our household, but edited them out as my husband did not feel comfortable sharing that much about our personal lives. Spoiler alter, no one is immune to thoughts of abortion! One little glimpse though…I spent the first 2 weeks of our pregnancy with our daughter wondering if we’d be able to keep her, because I have a serious hearth condition that doesn’t always play well with pregnancy. Luckily, I passed an important heart test and was “cleared for pregnancy” at 7 weeks pregnant!

I am writing a course called Ethical Considerations from a Legal Lens for Herman and Wallace, being run for the first time in December, so I decided to take a little dive into the Roe v. Wade history. I was going into the checks and balances of the legal system with the different branches: executive, constitutional and judiciary. It turns out that what I thought about Roe v. Wade and what it represented is actually different from what exists in reality. Roe v. Wade came about in Texas when a woman tried to get an abortion for a third pregnancy she did not wish to complete. Her doctor then became involved as well because he had been in trouble for performing illegal abortions two times previously. They sought legal counsel using a pseudonym, and this case was tried referencing the constitutional right to privacy in the 14th Amendment….this is where the penguins in my brain make me think of Hamilton and his friends and how they thought of all this stuff so many years prior…and I digress. 

The case was tried, and the men of the Supreme Court made the rulings about trimesters and viability, which they seem to have been confused about, as viability and trimesters are not always interchangeable. Prior to this case, the law in Texas permitted abortion only in cases where the procedure was necessary to save the life of the mother. After Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decided on the following framework moving forward.

1. In the first trimester, the woman has the exclusive right to pursue an abortion, not subject to any state intervention. 
2. In the second trimester, the state cannot intervene, unless her health is at risk. 
3. If the fetus becomes viable, once the pregnancy has progressed into the third trimester, the state may restrict the right to an abortion, but must always include an exception to any regulation that protects the health of the mother. 

These were things I did not know and wanted to share for the people who live under rocks like I do. Be kind: I live in a pelvic floor bubble, and politics are not my thing. I also did not know that this case was not what legalized abortion, it just gave clearer definitions for non-medically necessary abortions, and changed the ways that states can regulate abortion. I did not know that Jane Roe (that was an alias) ended up changing sides to become a “pro-life advocate,” and apparently had lots of drama and lies involved in her historical third pregnancy. I also did not know Ruth Bader Ginsberg was not part of this case! My mind was literally blown reading that. It was also news to me that RBG felt that Roe v. Wade was the wrong case to make stances on abortion! 

RBG argued that a more incremental approach to legalizing abortion would be better, rather than the nationwide ruling that invalidated dozens of state anti-abortion laws. Justice Ginsberg also suggested a ruling protecting abortion rights would have been more durable if it had been based on the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. This would have put the focus on gender equality, rather than the right to privacy that the justices highlighted. Looks like she was right, as it was able to be overturned recently. 

Check out this article if you want to read more of RBG’s stance on abortion and Roe v. Wade! 

Some other fun information was that Roe v. Wade and more accessibility of legal abortion did not increase the national rates of abortion. The rate stayed pretty much the same, just converting the number of illegal abortions into the number of safe ones. What did decrease was the number of abortion related deaths, since now the procedure could be performed safely when it was legal, and this number continued to decrease after the decision of this case. Also of note: there were three following cases after Roe v. Wade that continued to define and support this case.

The case that overturned Roe v. Wade is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. The decision was that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. It is the first time in American history that the Supreme Court has removed a fundamental right. The implications are that potentially half of U.S. states may immediately taking action to ban abortion outright, forcing people to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to access abortion care or to carry pregnancies against their will. The “good” news is that the right to legal medical abortions should stay intact for things like ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage in most states, but other stricter ones not so much. There are still a lot of other times an abortion may be wanted and now be unavailable to certain individuals. 

The overturning of Roe v. Wade is a major step back for our country. Even if you’re not convinced to be “pro-choice” by this blog, please understand that it is very dangerous to let the government start deciding what we can and cannot do to our bodies. I’m very thankful if you made it to the end of this. I would be willing to bet that the majority of people with uteruses have had a time or a moment where they had to think about abortion, whether very seriously, or in a more amorphous thought process, and it’s unfortunate that there are new regulations and restrictions from these legal changes.

Practically Yours,

Dr. Mora