Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

There was a time when I thought the worst thing about pro-choice activism was the irrational, and what I thought at the time was extreme and unnecessary, support for late-term abortions. It’s a gruesome scenario, a barbaric practice, and I thought that only horribly selfish people would insist on an abortion that late in the game. I thought these people were making right-wing extremists crazy and threatening the loss of the much more reasonable first-term procedures.

I was wrong. There’s a reason it’s called pro-choice.

I have recently read the painful and tragic accounts of the many couples who chose late-term abortion after learning at the earliest medically possible time that their unborn child, their fetus, had horrible abnormalities. From a 2006 account published in the Boston Globe (worth reading in its entirety):

I don’t remember much from those three days. Walking around with a belly full of broken dreams, it felt like what I would imagine drowning feels like — flailing and suffocating and desperate. Semiconscious. Surrounded by our family, I found myself tortured by our decision, asking over and over, are we doing the right thing? That was the hardest part. Even though I finally understood that pregnancy wasn’t a Gerber commercial, that bringing forth life was intimately wrapped up in death — what with miscarriage and stillbirth — this was actually a choice. Everyone said, of course it’s the right thing to do — even my Catholic father and my Republican father-in-law, neither of whom was ever “pro-choice.” Because suddenly, for them, it wasn’t about religious doctrine or political platforms. It was personal — their son, their daughter, their grandchild. It was flesh and blood, as opposed to abstract ideology, and that changed everything.

Another, from Andrew Sullivan’s Blog:

At 17 weeks gestation our baby had been diagnosed with major heart defects requiring a minimum of three risky open-heart surgeries beginning at birth, and would later require a heart transplant. At 19 weeks we were finally given our amnio results which revealed our baby also had Trisomy 21.

A surgeon at the major teaching hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram informed us that even if our baby somehow survived his palliative surgeries, this latest diagnosis meant he would not ever be eligible for a heart transplant. As we sat talking quietly in our living room, our priest shared with us that he’d spent time at the same hospital where we’d had our fetal echocardiogram and where our son would have had surgery.

He was there to support the family of a three-month-old who was having heart surgery. In the three weeks or so that he tended to this family, he also met 10 other families in the waiting room, each of whom also had young babies undergoing heart surgery. Sadly, within the short space of time our priest was there, every single one of those babies died.

I did go to Wikipedia to find some statistics. They were not encouraging:

In 1987, the Alan Guttmacher Institute collected questionnaires from 1,900 women in the United States who came to clinics to have abortions. Of the 1,900 questioned, 420 had been pregnant for 16 or more weeks. These 420 women were asked to choose among a list of reasons they had not obtained the abortions earlier in their pregnancies. The results were as follows:

* 71% Woman didn’t recognize she was pregnant or misjudged gestation
* 48% Woman found it hard to make arrangements for abortion
* 33% Woman was afraid to tell her partner or parents
* 24% Woman took time to decide to have an abortion
* 8% Woman waited for her relationship to change
* 8% Someone pressured woman not to have abortion
* 6% Something changed after woman became pregnant
* 6% Woman didn’t know timing is important
* 5% Woman didn’t know she could get an abortion
* 2% A fetal problem was diagnosed late in pregnancy
* 11% Other

Of the 420 women who chose to undergo a late-term abortion, the biggest reasons were ignorance and fear. “A fetal problem diagnosed late in pregnancy” accounted for only 2% of the 420, or approximately 8 of the 420 procedures. How is this issue to be dealt with? I am so sad for those who underwent this procedure because they were far more pregnant than they realized (obesity? ignorance or neglect of your own body? lying out of fear?), or because they were afraid of parents, husbands, friends, pastors, ministers, God, or whomever. The solution for all of those people would have been preventative. Birth control should be raining from the skies. Everywhere. So that the “choice” happens before the baby. Preventative.

And for those 2% with fetal abnormalities, I’m sorry I doubted you. I’m now more pro-choice than ever. George Tillman was a man who did a job that no one else wanted to do. He was not a hero, exactly, but a man who stood up for what was legal and in his mind, and the thankful hearts of couples who just wanted to end the pain, ethical. It was so, so wrong that he was shot and killed. I still cannot support late-term abortions when the babies are completely healthy. It seems like it should be possible to word a very specific law to provide for exceptional cases. It would be nice to get to a point where the debate became reasonable so that extremists and murderers ceased to rule the day.

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June 1, 2009 | Filed Under Perfect World 

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