Kansas Stories: What Late-Term Abortions Are Really Like

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This is part one 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.

Dear Ayelet,

Did you know who Dr. Tiller was before this week? I didn’t know his name, but I knew about “Kansas stories.” The Kansas stories were the stories that were worse than mine. We terminated a pregnancy at 23 weeks. If our world had started unraveling just a few weeks later, we might have had a Kansas story. We might have met Dr. Tiller.

I guess I should start by telling you what happened to us. I’m not telling to get your sympathy, but so we can have a conversation, the one that really needs to be had, about what late abortions are really like and why women have them. Midway through my second pregnancy (actually, my third, if you count the first-trimester miscarriage I'd had before my first daughter, Hannah), I went in for my 20-week sonogram, the one where they tell you if you’re having a boy or a girl and they measure all those tiny little fetal parts to make sure everything appears to be on track.

During the scan the technician informed us he was having a hard time getting pictures of our baby (a boy!), especially his intestines. At the time, I thought so little of it that immediately following the appointment my husband dropped me at the airport so that I could report a story on parents who go to heroic measures for children with rare genetic diseases. Three days later, in Houston, my cell phone rang: Kaiser. Can you come back? The follow-up sonogram revealed bone-like spots in the fetal bowel as well as anomalies in the kidney and brain. An amnio was scheduled for two days later. Results would be available in two weeks.

In that gap in time I felt nearly insane. I was pregnant—visibly so, I could feel kicks—but I did not know if I was having a baby. I watched the clock each day until 6 p.m., the moment the native New Englander in me decided I was allowed nightly valium. The news that I had contracted cytomegalovirus, or CMV, came one night when I was running water into the tub for our 18-month-old daughter’s bath. My husband was out. No one could tell me for sure what the health of our unborn child would be like. I was only told that if a woman contracts CMV for the first time while she’s in her second trimester of pregnancy and the virus is passed to the fetus, the consequences can be dire.

My unborn son would most likely be deaf, perhaps also visually impaired, and seriously mentally retarded. A doctor friend told me this prognosis could make a child with Down look nearly special-needs-free. But no one could tell us for sure what our unborn son’s health would be like, partly because no good studies existed. Almost all of the women with CMV and sonograms like mine terminated before reaching term.

We agonized but we did not waver; we decided to abort.

That part of the story makes me sad. The next part makes me angry. Nobody at Kaiser San Francisco would do the procedure. They did all the testing. (And let’s be real: The purpose of prenatal testing is to provide information that might result in terminating a pregnancy.) They supported my decision. But, I was told, to get rid of the baby—and please, hurry before he’s viable—I needed to see a guy up in Santa Rosa. So one day we packed an overnight bag, left Hannah with grandma, and drove the hour north. A doctor with waist-length hair and a hippie I-feel-your-pain style performed the surgery. My last memory, before losing consciousness, is of cold tears streaming down my face.