'Right before we left, we had to tell my son what was happening, which was rough, but I didn’t want to leave pregnant and come back not pregnant without telling him anything'
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Part of the reason I wanted to try getting pregnant before I turned 30 was that I felt like I might be facing an uphill battle — because I have two uteruses. When I was 18, they thought I had appendicitis, so I had a CAT scan — the radiologist said, “Ha, you don’t have appendicitis, but you might not be able to have children, or you might have kittens.” I wanted to give myself extra time, in case I needed it.
On deciding whether to have more children. I’m an only child, so I was okay with having one. Plus, I was going on the academic job market. People will advise you — and rightly so — that having babies will compromise your ability to move wherever a job takes you. But my husband really wanted more than one. And I didn’t want to wait until I got tenure or anything, so I said okay, we’ll have another. This was after I finished my Ph.D.; my husband was still in an academic program.
The nuchal translucency screen, plus the blood test — apparently that came back with one borderline elevated marker. They didn’t actually tell me that it came back elevated until the anatomy scan at 18 weeks. It doesn’t matter; you’re not going to terminate for one borderline result that could mean nothing. But still, I wish they had told me earlier.
I did go online to some mommy boards and look up the symptoms and measurements. There were people who said they’d had similar measurements, and their babies turned out okay. But studies show that doctors usually tend to give overly optimistic prognoses, not the other way around. And as it turned out, my doctor’s prognosis was too rosy — even though it was pretty fucking grim.
On preparing for a third-trimester abortion. We were lucky: Logistically arranging our travel was not as difficult as it could have been. A very close friend of mine was able to stay with our kids until my mother-in-law could come stay with them. But really what made this choice possible for us was money. We were fortunate enough to have family who helped and savings to wipe out, to do this. I remember my dad said, “I don’t have the cash to give you right now, but I’ll give you my credit card.
On beginning the abortion. The flight was sad; I got up and cried in the bathroom a lot. Someone on the bus from the airport to the car rental place asked when the baby was due. I’d always wanted to go to Colorado, to visit the Rockies. I just never thought it would be like this. No one talked about it. I think they didn’t want to upset me. I mean, he was trying to hit a moving target that he could only see on what must have been a 30-year-old ultrasound machine. But what was so hard about it, for me, was the baby had woken up. He’d started moving. That was really, really hard. It goes against every human instinct, to lie there and let someone do that. You’re not supposed to move, so I was trying not to cry and not to move. I just remember thinking, Go to sleep.
We were also trying to make funeral arrangements. My husband had called a funeral home; we had talked to my rabbi about what we were going to do with the body. It was important to me, theologically and personally — I wanted to mark and show respect to the fact that this was a person who was almost a person but who wasn’t. Thankfully, Judaism has some ways to talk about this kind of potential. There’s not the same kind of grieving process as a child who has been born.
This is already a violating procedure. You’re ending the life of the child, the fetus, whatever you want to call it. There was just something so horrifying about not just ending the pregnancy, but having the body torn into pieces.It felt like one last violation of how you are supposed to be able to protect your child — not to be able to protect the physical integrity/privacy of the body, to have it be exposed like that. I had wanted the body to be shown respect.
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