OUR choice - my personal story with abortion

I firmly believe that life is sacred. I also believe that bans and one-size-fits-all legislation eliminating or restricting access to abortions are wrong. The private, sacred, and often heart-wrenching choice of whether a woman or girl should carry and ultimately give birth to a child is not one that belongs in the hands of courts and legislative bodies. My wife and I have experienced first-hand the hell of having to make that choice.

Nine years ago, at the age of 28, and when three months pregnant with our second child, my wife, Katie, was diagnosed with brain cancer. The diagnosis came after she had a grand-mal seizure in the middle of the night. I woke up to her convulsing violently in the bed next to me. I turned her onto her side and called 911. As the seizure continued, she began spitting up blood and I terrifyingly wondered, for the first time but certainly not the last, if my wife and our unborn child were dying in my arms. By the time the paramedics arrived, the seizure had passed, my wife’s eyes were open, but she was non-responsive.

It is not uncommon for a brain tumor to first manifest by causing a seizure, but in spite of two anti-seizure medications that were marginally safe for use during later trimesters of pregnancy, the seizures continued at high frequency. Over the next six months, Katie had thousands of minor seizures (as many as 26 per day), and another five grand-mal seizures. She was constantly at-risk, nearly home-bound, and caring for our son at the same time. Our mothers took turns living with us in our small apartment to help out and enable me to finish my graduate program. The health and safety of both my wife and our unborn daughter was always at the forefront of our mind.

Eventually the day came that our daughter was born. She was healthy, with big, blueberry eyes and a head of brown hair. I was overwhelmingly relieved and grateful to hold her in my arms. As I gazed into my daughter’s face, I couldn’t help feeling that a huge weight of worry and stress had been lifted. Part of me felt robbed. I felt the worry about the tumor and seizures had, in many ways, robbed us of the joyous, happy anticipation of my daughter’s arrival. Robbed of the choice to have any more children, as the anti-seizure meds that my wife needed would with certainty cause birth defects during the first trimester of a pregnancy. Katie could not even hold our daughter without being seated and having someone immediately next to her to take our daughter in case Katie had a seizure. That pregnancy was filled with fear and anxiety, praying that all would be well while at the same time, trying to shield ourselves emotionally for the worst.

Following our daughter’s birth, Katie had brain surgery to remove most of the tumor. Going into surgery, we were aware of the risks, including possible paralysis, loss of memory and/or speech, organ failure… death. Sitting in the waiting room proved impossible for me, so I ran the stairs, up and down, to exhaustion. Thankfully, gratefully, the surgery went as well as possible. Still, the seizures continued, though at greatly reduced frequency (about 5-10 per month).

Flash forward four years, and in 2016, following the guidance of her doctors, Katie and I decided to try radiation and chemotherapy to try and gain further control of the seizures and prevent the tumor from coming back for as long as possible. Radiation therapy reduced the seizure frequency to about one seizure per month, and then this continued through the first two rounds of chemotherapy. Then, during the third round of chemo, Katie’s seizure frequency spiked. Suddenly she was having a seizure or two per week again, and we were baffled. Katie’s period hadn’t come on-time, but we knew that chemotherapy could affect normal body cycles, so we hadn’t thought anything of it, especially because she had an IUD. Just to be safe, she took a pregnancy test – it came back positive.

I felt like I’d been sucker-punched. A knife to the ribs. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to scream and cry as I dropped to the floor. While extremely grateful for two children we had, one of whom has special needs, accepting that we wouldn’t be able to have more children had been emotionally challenging for both Katie and me. Now, despite doing everything short of celibacy to avoid a pregnancy we knew would bring nothing but heartache, Katie was pregnant. Between the chemotherapy and the anti-seizure medications, there was no hope for this unborn child to live, let alone thrive. It felt like the cruelest of jokes, a waking nightmare filled with heartache and pain with increased seizures to punctuate the point. To avoid a host of additional risks, the IUD had to be removed immediately, which, we were told, had an extremely high risk of terminating the pregnancy. It did not. Then Katie began bleeding.

For two agonizing weeks, we waited, praying that the heart of a child, whom we wanted so desperately and knew we could never have, would stop beating. It didn’t, and the bleeding continued. Finally, we were faced with the only remaining option, an abortion. Katie’s doctors assured us that the pregnancy had no hope for long-term viability and posed a significant risk to Katie’s near and long-term health. With shattered hearts, we faced a choice we never dreamed we’d ever have to make. Ultimately, and after more prayers and tears than I can count, we made the choice to have an abortion.

Would the pregnancy have killed my wife? Would it have passed some arbitrary test of need set by legislatures? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In Missouri at that time, there was one clinic, ONE, that offered abortion services. After confirming our identities, and passing through a double set of locked doors, we met with the doctor, who agreed, without question, that an abortion was necessary in our case. She then apologized because Missouri law required that she go through, in detail and with pictures, the status of the fetus, ensure that we heard the heartbeat one more time, and then send us home to begin a mandatory one-week waiting period to give us time to ‘consider our choice’, as the law put it. There was no room to skip any of this to expedite a medically necessary procedure. Instead, an already grieving couple was put through yet another unnecessary emotional crucible to satisfy the demands of a law.

The actual abortion procedure proved extremely difficult, long, and painful.

Flash forward to present day. I’m not ‘over it’. I likely never will be. Was it the correct decision? I believe so, yes. Would I make the same decision today? Yes. Some may argue that we just didn’t have enough faith to accept our ‘miracle baby’. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps not. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t their decision. It wasn’t our neighbor’s decision, or that of our extended family. The decision was OURS. Making that decision was hell. I still ache five years later. But the decision was OURS - My wife’s and mine, given OUR unique circumstances, and according to our own conscience. The supreme court ruling last week threw open the door wide for states to take that decision away from those best positioned to make it and put it in the hands of courts and legislative bodies, to say nothing of states despicably enabling and creating systems to incentivize private citizens to play vigilante.

If we were in the same situation today, we would not legally be able to get the care we needed in the state we live in. Some argue that is fine because people can just go to a neighboring state. I’ve moved around enough and dealt with enough insurance and medical providers to know that, in addition to the difficult logistics of traveling and recovery, the costs of medical care can vary wildly, and care in a neighboring state may well be out of network, especially for those in lower income or state-sponsored medical programs.

I never thought I’d write this, let alone publish it online, but my wife and I decided our story needed to be shared considering everything happening in our country right now. To those who have gone through an abortion, my heart goes out to you. To those who are now facing that choice with ever fewer options, my heart breaks for you. To those of you who have never found yourself in a place to make an unimaginably difficult decision, may you never be so, but may you also be slow to judge where you cannot understand. To quote my wife, “You may say that [our] experience is unusual or that not all women who seek an abortion take it as seriously as [we] did. To that I say, it is not my place to judge, and no matter how restrictive or liberal an abortion law is, it will always make it impossible for women who have a real need to access the abortion they never wanted, but desperately need.”