Abortion is a medical procedure that saves lives. It saved my life.
America is in an era of extreme and inhumane anti-abortion laws.
Exactly 3 years ago today I was hospitalized for a miscarriage.
Despite Roe v Wade, women and doctors aren’t safe. Prosecutors HAVE jailed women for miscarriages. In Alabama, doctors who perform the abortion procedure can face felony charges and up to 99 years in prison — the same and sometimes more prison time than convicted rapists face in the state.
I’m going to get a little technical and vulnerable — because if you haven’t gone through this, it’s hard to understand (and easy to underestimate) how much women have to figure things out on their own to protect their bodies.
Pregnancies come all of a sudden.
I’ve always had irregular periods. I missed my period for 2 months so took a pregnancy test just to be sure. It came out negative. A few weeks later, I took another test. I was shocked when I saw the confirmation that I was pregnant. I was 11 weeks along and had NO IDEA. I had no symptoms and actually, the pregnancy test didn’t even come out positive until that time. I later found out ectopic pregnancies usually don’t show up in pregnancy tests until much later.
I went to see my doctor. They told me there was a “heartbeat” but it looked strange and to go to the hospital.
That same day, I found out it was an ectopic pregnancy (specifically, a cervical ectopic). These types of pregnancies are life-threatening: the pregnancy is in the wrong place, can expand at any moment, leading the woman to bleed to death.
I went through a long and arduous journey to figure out next steps. Since cervical ectopics are so rare, there wasn’t a “protocol.” I had to ask a lot of questions and advocate for myself. My doctors were trying to find the best procedure that would terminate the pregnancy and keep me alive. In the end, they went with using methotrexate (chemotherapy) to stop the cells from growing. Because I was far along at 11 weeks, I had to get 8 shots of methotrexate over several days — this was far beyond what they wanted to give me. I was also starting to lose a lot of blood. I had lost so much blood that I had to get a blood transfusion and a procedure done to stop the blood loss. It was extremely painful — a level of pain I didn’t even know existed.
I spent a week hospitalized. I lost 10 lbs, much of it blood loss, was emotionally drained from the scare of potentially bleeding to death and losing a pregnancy.
After all of this — being in the hospital, getting chemotherapy, hormonal changes, being studied like a lab animal (cervical ectopics are less than 0.1%) — I got home and had a huge hospital bill. My boyfriend at the time did not get a bill, even though he was just as responsible.
Women have been investigated for murder regarding a miscarriage. Can you imagine if they tried to investigate me for murder? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The pregnancy almost killed ME. The only thing that women should get after a miscarriage is support.
Abortion is a medical procedure that saves lives. It saved my life.
My doctors had to abort the pregnancy. Sometimes, women and men make the choice to not continue a pregnancy. It doesn’t matter what the reason is, the decision to have a child is a big, life-changing decision. If a woman decides she doesn’t want to, she needs to have a safe environment to make that decision (the next step is to remove judgment). Right now, women in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Ohio aren’t safe.
In 2016 (around the same time I went through this), The NYTimes reported that a woman who miscarried at 24 weeks was charged with “abuse of a corpse,” a class C felony that carries a 3–10 year prison sentence in Arkansas. Her bail was set at $50,000 and she’s still awaiting trial. In NY, a woman who was not wearing her seatbelt during a car crash, which the jury felt caused her unborn fetus to die, was sentenced up to 9 years in prison.
Being in control of your own body is a fundamental right — and now with the new abortion bans, this is under dispute.
The time is now. Women AND men have to speak up. Politicians banning abortions means they are trying to own women’s bodies, their decisions, their free-will, and literally when they can stay alive.
#youknowme
