A Matter of Health and Safety: Women Speak Out on the Federal Abortion Ban

When President Bush signed the federal abortion ban in 2003, PPFA, Planned Parenthood Golden Gate (PPGG), the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Abortion Federation, and the American Civil Liberties Union challenged it in federal district courts around the country.  Leading ob/gyns at major medical institutions testified against the ban because it would prevent them from providing the care that is best to protect their patients' health.  The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Nurses Association and many other medical groups oppose the federal ban.  Until now, every court that examined the ban struck it down because, among other things, it fails to protect women's health.

The threat to women's health and safety posed by the federal abortion ban is a very real one. Read the personal stories of several women below, or listen to an audio version of one woman's story on SaveROE.com. 

Amanda

"Unfortunately it was quickly made clear that it was too dangerous to continue my pregnancy.  The hygroma was too large on the baby’s head.  It was a guarantee that she was going to die. The only question was when. I tried to fight it. ...  If I waited and let her die naturally I would have risked my own health and possibly my ability to have any future children. ...  All possibilities ended with the same eventual outcome.  My decision ended her suffering and kept us from prolonging the loss that was inevitable."

Carrie

"On November 11, 2005, I elected to have [a] CVS test. ...  Then, the test results came in. ...  We knew chromosome 14 was incompatible with life, and chromosome 22 could mean Cat Eye Syndrome.  Both my husband and I wanted the baby very much, and neither one of us was willing to terminate the pregnancy on a “maybe.” ... 

“I had the amnio on 12/26/05, and the results came in on Jan. 13, 2006. It confirmed without doubt — she had Cat Eye Syndrome tetrasomy in every cell of her body.  The last 3 sonograms showed ... our baby’s kidneys were beginning to malfunction. ... 

“We made this decision because we loved our daughter so much.  We didn’t want her to suffer the definite and the untold problems she was sure to endure, if she even made it.  We made the best decision we could with the information we had.  We fought for her.  We wanted her.  But we didn’t want to condem[n] her to [a] life of agony."

Catherine

"[I]f I tried to carry to term and suffered a lateterm fetal death or miscarriage, there was a serious chance of complications for me.  I might hemmorrage [sic], I might get an infection, the trisomy might interfere with the development of the placenta and leave me deathly ill. My OB told me, in very plain language, that if I carried this pregnancy to term, there was a very high chance that I would never bear another child. 

"There was no good choice.  There was no hope of a healthy child.  There was no hope of a living child.  I could have an abortion, or I could see how my luck went with carrying this doomed pregnancy to term and risk my life and future fertility, and I elected to have an abortion."

Donna

"My health was at risk, but they didn't know why. I guess one of the biggest health risks at the time was that I kept bleeding, but since they didn't know why I was bleeding they didn't know how to stop it. But losing the blood all the time and bleeding so much I didn't feel healthy and I was very concerned about giving birth to a baby that would die.

"To have a politician telling the doctor what is the best course of medical action for a patient is just ridiculous. There's no way to be able to decide that on a sweeping basis; it's so individual. It's so hard to imagine. (I mean) I don't even want to tell you what you should have for lunch yet alone what you can do with the rest of your life. It's so hard to imagine that someone who doesn't know me ... my family, my friends — they couldn't even make this decision for me. To think that someone who I didn't even know, who'd never met me would be able to decide this and then decide the fate of the doctor.

"Subsequent to this pregnancy I am fortunate and happy enough to have two wonderful daughters. To think that if my daughters got pregnant and had been in the same situation that they wouldn't have been able to make this choice is horrifying, so it's just really personal and it can't be something that's decided, you know, by people in suits far, far away. My empathy would be for any woman who would be in a situation like this ... that it needs to be her decision in conjunction with her family and her doctor and her support group."

Read Donna’s full story, published in The Indianapolis Star.

Heather

"It took me an agonizing week to make this heartbreaking choice, but in the end I know it was the best decision for me, my family and most importantly, our child. We lost our oldest son at 6 years and 10 months old, to complications from having a rare type of dwarfism. That dwarfism was exactly the reason why we had the CVS test done. We knew without a doubt that we could never in good conscience bring another child into this world with that disease. …  Most genetic defects come with their own list of extra problems, which I didn’t take into account, and put that child at risk for painful procedures and even death. No child deserves to come into a world of pain. That is what made my decision for me. ..."

Ilene

It was Friday afternoon at nursery school and Simone just couldn't wait until Mother's Day to give me her present—a tote bag printed with a photo of the two of us. When we got home, Toby greeted me with the card he'd made for me in kindergarten. We all looked forward to dad coming home from a business trip. It was the start of a perfect Mother's Day weekend. I was 40, and I was joyfully pregnant. "It'll be three kids by next Mother's Day," I remember thinking.

When Monday came, I called my doctor for the results of my quadruple screen blood test from the past week, nothing I really sweated because a CVS test a couple months before had told us that our baby's chromosomes were completely normal. This time though, the doctor said that one of the screening tests concerned him and asked me to go to the hospital right away.

Read the rest of Ilene’s story, published in Newsweek.

Melissa

"I have Lupus. The first 12 weeks or so were pretty normal. Then I was put on bed rest. ...  I had discharge, cramping. ... 

"I was real sick — with the disease and complications.  Practically every complication that I could have — pre-term labor, starting first trimester, cramping, shortening of the cervix all the way through. ... 

"I was put on bed rest for another week and told to drink fluids constantly but then I started hemorrhaging. ...  They put me on bed rest in the hospital, upside down, with daily ultrasound and IV calming medicine but my fluid kept getting lower.  About 5 days later, the doctor said I had to make a decision. ...  The baby was not viable.  The doctor said the baby could not survive without fluid.  I begged for another day.  This was a Catholic medical center. ...  The doctor said I’d have to go elsewhere to terminate.  I was in a slight Lupus flareup. ... 

"They wouldn’t transfer me to another hospital.  They wouldn’t make any arrangements. ... 

"I made the arrangements myself.  I called [the local clinic] and was blessed to speak [to the counselor there]."

Robin

"When he told me that there was really something seriously wrong, my life changed at that very moment forever, and I will always look back at that point and it made me realize among other things that there's no way you can deal with this in the abstract, that until it happens to you, until it's real, you just don't know how you're going to feel, you don't know what you're going to do.

"It's the single most difficult choice I've ever had to make in my life and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. The day that I got the phone call I was out shopping for maternity clothes, you know. It never crossed my mind that I would be faced with that decision and my whole world fell apart. (I mean) I was this child's mom already and was also, you know, the mom of a one-year-old who, you know, I just knew that my decision was going to affect my whole family forever regardless, no matter what I did, and I just didn't think it was fair to anybody. I didn't think it was fair to the baby that I was carrying to bring it into the world to maybe not even be here for very long and to be very sick. So I made a decision that thankfully I was allowed to make, that I also thought was the best thing for my family for my life and my health and my situation.

"Doctors. Families. Women. People that know what they're facing are people who need to be making the decisions. These are people who are committed to helping people, and like I said, committed to helping women in their darkest moments, and the thought of being punished for doing their jobs and for doing them well and caring about their patients is just incredible to me. I mean, what does that say about how much we value women's lives and their health in this society? We're willing to let a woman face death or serious health failures to promote an ideology.

"I can only imagine the desperation that a woman would feel to find herself in that place and to not have any choice.

"Since then I've had two more kids, and part of the healing process for me has really been knowing that if I had made a different choice the children that I have now wouldn't be here."

Teresa

"I was 23 weeks pregnant and I had an ultrasound that seemed to indicate that there were some problems with the baby. There were delays in the bone growth. We saw two separate perinatologists who told us that our baby had a lethal form of skeletal dysplasia, which is a bone growth disorder, and that the baby would most certainly die and very soon after the birth.

"It was a decision that was pretty fraught with emotion and a great deal of sadness and grief, but we decided to end the pregnancy at that point. This would have been our first child.

"It was a decision that our family made; we did not make it lightly, and my husband and I had very much wanted this child, but we knew that she was given a body that couldn't sustain her life. I think that it's a decision that every parent and family needs to make on their own without any interference with politics. It's their choice. It should be their choice absolutely.

"I have such faith in the doctors who took care of us. The idea that their professional opinions would be completely discounted by politicians is an outrage. I mean, it's an insult to the medical profession. And it just makes me so angry; it makes me scared for the women in our country, it really does.

"This is something that needs to be done. This law needs to be fought."