Ayelet Waldman and Elizabeth Weil: The Truth About Late-Term Abortions

This is part two of a dialogue about having a late-term abortion between Ayelet Waldman, author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace [2], and Elizabeth Weil, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and the co-author, with Dara Torres, of Age is Just a Number: Achieve Your Dreams At Any Stage In Your Life [3]. You can read part one here [4].

Dear Liz,

Before I found myself an inadvertent member of what my new friends and I called (in what was surely an excess of black and miserable humor) the Dead Baby Club, I knew that terminations based on fetal abnormalities existed—after all, there was a reason that so few babies with Down's Syndrome are born to women over the recommended age for fetal testing nowadays—but I assumed that I didn't know any members of that sad sorority. And then we received our own diagnosis of our baby's genetic abnormality (at 17 weeks, via ultrasound), and suddenly it was as if I had put on a pair of 3D glasses in a movie theater. They (we) were everywhere: among the mothers of my children's preschool classmates, friends from college, neighbors. It's only once you join the Dead Baby Club that you realize how tragically large it is.

I've written about our baby—Rocketship, we called him, a placeholder name given by his older brother—in my latest book, Bad Mother [5], and on the Huffington Post [6].

It has been critically important to me to be open about this experience for so many reasons. I have from the first used the word "abortion" even though so many women in our shared circumstances shy away from it. I researched the procedure so I knew exactly what I was doing. I told the dozens and dozens of people who asked after our pregnancy not just that we "lost him" but how. In a way this brutal honesty was a kind of self-flagellation, but also it was a way to fully acknowledge and accept responsibility.

I've continued to be open about this both because the pain is real, and I don't want to pretend it isn't, and because I worry that the bile-spewers like Randall Terry and Bill O'Reilly have managed to characterize late-term abortions as something women do on a whim. Like, "Shit, am I pregnant? Thirty weeks? Damn, better get that taken care of." But you and I are the face of late-term abortion. You and I and my friend whose baby had a fatal form of dwarfism diagnosed at 24 weeks. Or my friend whose babies (two of them) had such profound physical and mental malformations that they would not have survived more than a few minutes outside her womb.

But then, at the same time, my case—in which the genetic abnormality was certain but the effects unknowable—and the cases of women whose babies suffer defects that won't kill them are much more complex. As are the cases of the young girls who are afraid to acknowledge their pregnancies until later. Or women who find themselves the victims of abuse. I'd love to use this opportunity to discuss not just our desperate commitment to abortion rights (and it is desperate), but also what, if any, limitations you think might be reasonable. Is there room to reach out to the less crazy part of the right wing and say, "OK, that woman in your imaginings, the one who goes to Wichita to have her third 36th-week abortion just because she keeps hysterically shrieking she has a migraine? Okay, we'll give you that. We'll accept limitations of abortions under certain strictest of circumstances." Or, does that lead inevitably down the slippery slope of someone (a man, of course) judging whether a woman's "excuse" is sufficient?

Do you, personally, have a place that you draw the line? Or are you comfortable in saying that the only line we are allowed to draw is our own?

Read Liz's response here [7].

Photograph of pregnant woman by Anna Jurkovska/Shutterstock Images LLC/Getty Images.