Exactly! my mom works as a pediatric cardiologist and does fetal echo. What this means is that the mothers coming to her, they have already been seen by the normal obgyn who, during a routine checkup, saw that something might have been abnormal with the fetus' heart. And so theyre sent to my mom, who looks at the echo and then, sometimes, has to sit these mothers down and tell them the worst news of their life. Their baby has a heart defect.
Sometimes its something survivable. Not minor, per say, but technology and medicine has come a long way. We can save a baby who is born with only half a heart.
But some things we can't save. The fetus could die during the pregnancy and cause immense risk to the mother. Perhaps the baby could be born but their chances of survival after the fact are low, so low that its almost a given that they would die after a very expensive and all too short battle for life.
And another thing is that my mother works in a lower income area. She sees people who are barely scraping by, who are living in homeless shelters, who are here on a visa, who can't speak english. These mothers sometimes might not be able to afford the care their child would need to be able to survive. The decision to abort the baby is not made out of some callous disregard or maliciousness, its a tough, grief filled one and for some may be the only option.
I will always remember this one story my mother told me years ago. She had looked at the echo and had found an abnormality, something that would kill the fetus. She always starts out by drawing a simplified picture of the heart (its heart shaped like the emoji) in order to show the parents and make sure they are able to understand exactly what my mom is telling them is wrong. The couple were from somewhere in the middle east I think? And when she explained this and told them that it was probably genetic, they were both near inconsolable. As it turns out this was the woman's third pregnancy, and the other two had ended up being miscarriages, and the doctors in their home country had never been able to tell why. And imagine, being in that chair, learning that its not just bad luck. That something in you is passing those corrupted genes on, killing your own child in the womb. The decision to abort was not one taken lightly, it was an act of mercy for the family. A chance to say goodbye on their own terms.
So yeah whenever I see pro lifers I remember all the stories my mom has told me, that she still tells me. The pro lifers would call those women evil. They would look at the grieving mother, who has just learned that her body has betrayed her in the most literal sense, slipping a poison gene into her child, sabotaging all the fetus' chances at making it out alive, and they would call her cruel and evil. They would rather force these women through the trauma of a miscarriage, or watching their child waste away and die before their second year was up, or even dying themselves due to complications. And I just can't accept that this would be the less evil. These women going through late term abortions are facing the worst news of their lives, and they DESERVE the dignity of deciding what to do with that news, and the ability to make an informed choice based on it.
