If you choose to inform yourself, there's a great deal of information below.
Perpetuating ignorance with inflammatory rhetoric accomplishes nothing.
No, Donald Trump, abortions do not happen at 9 months pregnant
Fuck You, Trump. My baby was “ripped out of my womb” because I was going to die.
I’ve written this story more times than I can count because people keep saying bullshit like what Trump said in the debate last night. In case you were smart and didn’t watch, here’s what he said.
“If you go with what Hillary is saying, in the ninth month, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb of the mother just prior to the birth of the baby.
Now, you can say that that’s OK and Hillary can say that that’s OK. But it’s not OK with me, because based on what she’s saying, and based on where she’s going, and where she’s been, you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month on the final day. And that’s not acceptable.”
Listen, you fucking idiot. What you described literally never happens.
If a baby is near full term and the mother is sick — say, like me, dying from a pregnancy related disease like preeclampsia—they deliver the fucking baby alive if possible. In fact, if the baby is past viability, they will whisk it to the NICU once born and do their damnedest to save that baby’s life.
But here’s the thing: viability varies. Fetuses, you might be surprised to know, grow at different rates and are impacted by different things so “viability” is fluid and is not a one-size-fits-all determination of the likelihood of the baby surviving outside the womb. And sometimes babies are so sick they won’t survive—even in the ninth month of pregnancy. Even so, those babies are DELIVERED, not “ripped out”, you fucking asshole.
Not that you’ll listen to me, you selfish opportunistic prick, because I’m extremely low on your personal pussy grabbing scale being both old AND fat, but here’s my story, briefly.
I fought like hell to get pregnant. After our first IVF cycle, I was pregnant with twin boys. At a routine ultrasound appointment at 23 and a half weeks pregnant, we found out one of the twins had died. My doctor asked me to come from the ultrasound clinic to his office to chat once we learned this, and it was during that appointment that I was given three standard tests: I was weighed, my blood pressure was taken, and my urine tested for protein.
The results were terrible. My blood pressure was ridiculously high, I’d gained eighteen pounds of fluid in just a week or so, and my urine dipstick actually turned black because there was so much protein being shed by my body. (Find out about the symptoms of preeclampsia here.)
It was preeclampsia, a disease that effects some 5–8% of pregnancies. 76,000 women each year DIE from this disease. And guess what cures preeclampsia? Only one thing: ending the pregnancy.
Here’s the good news: in most cases, preeclampsia develops later in pregnancy, and most of those babies are saved. This is fantastic, although it’s also worth noting that preeclampsia is one of the leading causes of cerebral palsy.
But that’s not what happened to me.
Once I was admitted to the hospital, I started getting sicker. I started vomiting. My blood pressure soared. My head hurt so badly I thought it would kill me. I stopped producing urine as my organs began to shut down. I was moments away from seizures, comas, and death — yes, motherfucker, DEATH—when a team of doctors surrounded my bed and told me I had to terminate the pregnancy or my surviving son and I would BOTH die.
Let me make this very, very clear: this was the worst fucking day of my life. It was absolutely wrenching, devastating, and horrid. My husband and I sobbed after we received the news.
We wanted those babies more than anything.
(Another note: if you tell me that the doctors lied to me and my surviving twin was far enough along to go to the NICU, go back and read what I said about viability. Because of the nature of my disease, my surviving twin was tiny and near death. He would not have lived. So spare me your “prolife” bullshit links and faux kindness, m’kay?)
And my doctor—who happened to be only one of TWO doctors in the Philadelphia area who knew how do the procedure that would save my life—said it was also the worst day of his professional career. It sucked. For all of us. So fucking much.
Donald, what you described last night literally never happens. EVER. Nope, not once. Not ever. In EVERY SINGLE CASE of pregnancy termination done in the final trimester of pregnancy it is because the mom is dying or the baby’s condition is incompatible with life.
Do you understand? Oh, why the fuck did I even ask that. Of course you don’t. Because you live in an alternate universe while the rest of us are over here living in motherfucking reality.
Asshole. Fuck you, Trump. Just that. FUCK YOU.
I Had a Second Trimester Abortion & I Am Sick Of Hearing Politicians' Opinions About It
KAREN AGATONE
I have been pro-choice for as long as I can remember. But by the time I was married and pregnant with my first child, I didn’t really put much thought into the idea that I would ever need an abortion. I desperately wanted to have my baby. It took my husband and I six months to successfully conceive our daughter, and only a few moments to learn that she would never live. We found out halfway through my pregnancy, at a routine scan at 20 weeks of gestation. The purpose of the scan is to measure the baby, to make sure everything is developing properly, and for some parents, to reveal the gender for the first time.
We already knew we were having a daughter; I had already had plenty of advanced testing done to ensure the health of my growing baby. There are so many prenatal testing options available, and we wanted to take advantage of them for peace of mind — finding out I was going to have a girl was just an added bonus. I had all kinds of testing done; ultrasounds every four weeks and blood work to rule out any chromosomal abnormalities or developmental issues. Every test came back negative, so I thought I had no reason to worry when we walked into our 20-week ultrasound. I was wrong.
Evelyn, the daughter we had already lovingly named, was measuring far behind where she should have been for 20 weeks. A high-risk doctor came in to look, and told us that Evelyn had a lethal form of skeletal dysplasia, which is the medical term for dwarfism. We struggled to understand what this meant and how grave the condition was. The doctor explained that he believed our baby’s condition was not compatible with life. His words hung in the air. We couldn’t understand how this could happen. Everything was fine a few weeks ago. We had just bought a crib for her. This had to be some big mistake.
Devastated, we sought a second opinion at a world-renowned children’s hospital only an hour from our home. After eight hours of advanced testing, a group of specialists sat us down and told us that Evelyn had a condition called Thanatophoric Dysplasia (TD). TD is a very rare, spontaneous genetic mutation that usually presents itself in the crucial fetal developmental weeks around the midway point in pregnancy. Because babies don’t survive TD, it’s not a recessive gene that can be passed down, so it’s considered a complete fluke in the genetic lottery. Only 1 in 50,000 babies are diagnosed with TD, and ours just happened to be one of them.
The condition is characterized by misshapen and shortened limbs and a chest that is too small to develop lung growth. Evelyn had all of the textbook symptoms, and without proper development of her lungs, she would never be able to breathe on her own. We were given our options and sent home to grieve the family we thought we were making.
The options were bleak. I could chose to carry to term and see if Evelyn would even make it that far. If she did, she would likely live for a few hours, maybe even a few days. The other option was to have an abortion and spare Evelyn any possible suffering she might face. Given that her condition was not only lethal, but would be extremely painful for her as she continued to grow inside of me, my husband and I made the gut-wrenching decision to terminate my pregnancy.
Hearing friends say to me, "But what you did isn't really an abortion" undermines the heartbreaking road I have traveled. The choice I made was because I had a pregnancy crisis, which is why any woman chooses to have an abortion.
The days after the diagnosis and my decision to end my pregnancy were blurry and painful. I barely ate or slept, thinking about the gravity of our choice, but it was one I knew we had to make. Selfishly, we wanted to hang on, imagining that maybe the doctors had it all wrong and everything would magically be OK. But every time we started thinking about what could be, we remembered the images we saw firsthand on her ultrasound, and the magnitude of what the specialists told us. There was no denying how sick Evelyn was. As parents, it was our job to plan for our child to have the best quality of life, but we could not continue to plan for her to have no quality of life.
Once our decision was made, we were counseled extensively by doctors and nurses about what an abortion at my stage of pregnancy entailed, from the physical risks (which were lower than with a normal, full-term delivery), to the emotional pain I would experience. I would be allowed to have my abortion in a large hospital, in a safe environment, under excellent medical care. Because of my daughter's malformations, it was too risky for me to go through labor and delivery, so I was under anesthesia for my procedure and never got to hold the baby I spent so long dreaming about. At 21 weeks gestation, I chose to carry a lifetime of pain to spare Evelyn one moment of it.
https://www.bustle.com/articles/180946-i-had-a-second-trimester-abortion-i-am-sick-of-hearing-politicians-opinions-about-it
No comments:
Post a Comment