Life
Ayelet Waldman and Elizabeth Weil: The Truth About Late-Term Abortions
A dialogue about joining the "Dead Baby Club."
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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, 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. You can read part one here.
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, and on the Huffington Post.
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.
. 
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Comments
Thanks for this great post,
By: adisyahya | Wed, 09/30/2009 - 12:52
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I don't know how this
By: bananaripe | Tue, 08/25/2009 - 00:57
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Another member too
By: NatalieK | Wed, 06/10/2009 - 09:53
I want to thank both authors for writing about this topic.
I had a therapeutic abortion (that's the clinical term) this spring at 15 weeks after receiving the results of CVS testing. The baby had Trisomy 18, a disorder I didn't know the name of prior to this pregnancy. My doctor and genetic counselor advised me that I might miscarry, or the baby was likely to die at birth, as Trisomy 18 babies have severe mental retardation and heart and other physical deformations.
These test results were devastating, to me and to my family. But we had talked, prior to getting pregnant, about what we would do should this situation arise. I knew what I was getting into by taking a CVS test.
I have grieved privately and quietly, as only my very close friends and family even knew I was pregnant. I have been honest about the situation, choosing to tell people, when I do talk about it, that I terminated the pregnancy due to genetic abnormality instead of saying something like, "We lost the baby" or "I miscarried..." and I have to say that has been cathartic. After reading the accounts here in this series, I will continue to be open about my experience.
My second trimester abortion doesn't fit the scenario of pro-life or right-wing television pundits who want to characterize the situation as one of evil, of carelessness, or dangerous frivolity. I'm a mother already of a healthy child. I am well educated and employed. There is nothing frivolous about what I went through. This wasn't about being careless. Or not wanting a baby with down's syndrome. Or having a migraine. Or using abortion as birth control. Andohbytheway, adoption isn't an option with a child who has serious, severe mental and physical abnormalities.
There is nothing cavalier about the 4% of us that choose the option of terminating a pregnancy after 16 weeks.
And to those of you out there that think the anxiety and trauma of the abortion is too much for a woman to live with, think again. I have no post traumatic stress disorder from terminating this pregnancy. I'm sad, and I grieve for the loss of my baby, but no more than I would had I miscarried. My sadness began with the test results. I don't regret for even one minute having the abortion. I'm thankful for the option of CVS testing, and thankful to have the option to do something about those test results should they come out much less than optimal. I'm thankful for the wonderful health workers and doctors who performed the abortion.
I'm thankful to have control over what happens to my body. I hope we live in a country where my daughter will continue to have this right.
And I am really, really thankful for Ayelet and Liz, who wrote about this subject.
another member of the Dead Baby Club
By: massdistraction | Tue, 06/09/2009 - 14:19
I wasn't going to chime in, but I've blogged about it publicly in the past anyhow, in an effort to soften the stigma surrounding medically necessary late-term abortions.
In 2003 my ex and I attempted to give my son a sibling. We were soooooo excited! Our first ultrasound was somewhat delayed, because of the Thanksgiving holiday. When we finally went in it was like something out of a nightmare. We discovered the baby was missing the top of its skull. Each of our options sucked. The creepiest? Carry the fetus to term (and have strangers and acquaintances constantly approach with congratulations that didn't apply). Or we could induce labor, which was inherently risky as I'd had a c-section with my son who had been breech. Or terminate. That seemed the least traumatic. But I had to sit out a 24 hour waiting period in Minnesota because of Governor Pawlenty's b.s.. I believe the Woman's Right to Know Act now allows for cases like anencephaly, but there was no such exclusion at the time. After all the delay, we wound up terminating at around 24 weeks. We were told the fetus was "incompatible with life" and had I tried to deliver this baby boy he would have died within minutes of birth.
Yes, my late term abortion was depressing as hell. But the hospital staff were kind and compassionate and we were grateful to them for the difficult work they're doing. It's unfortunate we didn't have a happier ending to our story, when we tried again a few years later. That perfectly formed baby was stillborn at 29 weeks. Sigh.
I am totally supportive of
By: Michelle Mood | Fri, 06/05/2009 - 20:32
I am totally supportive of the right to abortion, but I think we Americans ahve our heads in the sand about it. We are mostly Christians or other believers in religion, particularly when compared with Europeans, but in Europe in 1998-99 I saw many,many developmentally disabled people with their families, in public, at pools, in restaurants, going shopping. We have this huge political force that is "pro life" and yet I think it's obvious Americans have been eliminating Downs Syndrome babies for many many years. Individuals make these choices and feel comfortable with them, and yet many are willing to restrict abortion availability for other reasons. Having cared for developmentally disabled people professionally for many months in institutions, I know that they have a wide range of enjoyment and capabilities, but Downs syndrome people are almost all sunny and friendly and can have wonderful lives if given the chance. To me the hypocrisy of ridding our society of happy, sunny Downs Syndrome people but overall being against abortion in other cases is ridiculous!
(Note also that there are wonderful supports for disabled people in Europe that our government won't provide, so often its economically rational to abort high-needs kids!).
Did it too
By: l41n13 | Thu, 06/04/2009 - 16:40
I watched the Rachel Maddow show the other night, and they suggested that women "come out" and admit to having abortions. I've never talked about it, but I had one before Roe. I had to travel from PA to New York City. It's had many effects on my life, but I do not regret my decision. I do regret not raising my child to adulthood. There were many women with me, from a young teenager to a woman with 3 kids. None of us chose this lightly. I had many concerns about birth defects, but also felt that I was much too young to become a mother. Now, I'm the mother of 2 grown men.
It's a heart wrenching decision to make, and those of you who are so condemning should know that you were very lucky not to become pregnant in a bad situation. We need to make birth control more available, and help anyone put into this situation, not condemn people or especially do anything violent.
Is Downs Syndrome a Death Sentence?
By: kari | Thu, 06/04/2009 - 15:26
I understand why you personally felt that you needed to go through with your abortion and my heart goes out to you and other women in similar situations but I am frustrated with this article (and many others) that treat Downs syndrome as a legitimate reason to terminate a pregnancy. Downs Syndrome is not a death sentence. Most individuals with Downs Syndrome are capable of living full lives, perhaps not in the exact same way as the average person but still honorable full lives. It is disgusting to see that blatant discrimination against children with special needs is culturally acceptable as long as it happens before the child is born.