What Could Have Happened to Me if Abortion Was Illegal
On Mother’s Day 2008, I woke up in a hospital bed. Just hours before, an ER doctor had removed an embryo and the home it had made inside one of my fallopian tubes. This not-to-be-baby was an ectopic pregnancy, the kind that is always fatal to the fetus, and often life-threatening to its mother.
The abortion saved my life.
Out for dinner the night before, I did not know that there was anything wrong with my pregnancy until my blood pressure and I both hit the bathroom floor. The second time I passed out, it was near the bar. Someone called 911.
I wanted this pregnancy. In the ambulance, I interrogated the paramedic when he started my IV; was the drip even mildly dangerous during pregnancy, like a vodka tonic or a raw sushi roll? Later, at the hospital, I refused morphine because I feared it might hurt the baby. (I ultimately asked for all the morphine they had.)
I didn’t understand that it was over. The pregnancy had weaponized, causing internal bleeding.
If the doctors did not remove the embryo, the hemorrhaging would not stop. They wheeled me into the ER and did what they had to do. Efficiently and without questioning.
Years later, after reading the Supreme Court’s leaked decision that threatens to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, I wonder: If abortion had been illegal in my state, would I have survived my ectopic pregnancy?
Without the protections of Roe, pregnant women in American emergency rooms will almost certainly lack proper care.
Roe, which came out the year before I was born, protects a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion and control her reproductive life. Without access to safe abortions, health experts warn, maternal mortality rates will rise. Not only because women will have unsafe abortions but also, I suspect, because hospitals will delay or withhold critical care.
That’s because when governments take ownership of women’s bodies, and when healthcare systems cower under the threat of criminal penalties, eyebrows raise. Forms multiply.
Hospital lawyers get out of their swivel chairs and consult with each other. Here comes Officer So-and-So to my bedside with his little notebook and his pen and his questions.
If abortion is illegal, pregnant women facing life-threatening conditions may have to wait for bureaucrats to check boxes. I needed that surgery right away. I lived because the hospital moved quickly.
If abortion was illegal, I would have been a more worrisome liability. At worst, a suspect. Did I cause this problem? Was this really an accident? Could the fetus be “reimplanted,” as Republican legislators in Ohio suggested in their “heartbeat bill” in 2019?
(The answer according to medical science is no, and also, WTF, Ohio. No certified physician in their right mind would consider this non-option, but policymakers wield power and create confusion.)
Years from now, will medical teams have comprehensive training and experience handling emergency abortions? Will med schools properly cover a procedure shrouded in legal complexity?
We don’t know the answers to these questions yet.
But we know that interrogating patients, consulting lawyers, and covering your ass takes precious time.
And at great medical and emotional cost to the patient.
This future is even more dangerous for poor women and women of color. Non-English speakers. Those with no ID. Those already “othered” in the system.
What can we do?
I’ve visited that bathroom floor in my imagination so many times. Even after I gave birth to our second child a year later. Even as my memory dimmed and resurfaced.
It’s not easy to tell this story. All the scarier for women who choose to end their pregnancies. I didn’t bear the heft of choice; I suppose I am less subject to the weight of judgment.
And still.
Women who share these personal (and political) experiences inspire me. Together we’re painting a sort of social mural, telling a story only we can tell, one people can hear. The right to make our own reproductive choices is sacred, and so is our testimony.
