What happens when they ban abortion
This story about women suffering under the new abortion ban in Poland is just horrifying:
It was shortly before 11 p.m. when Izabela Sajbor realized the doctors were prepared to let her die.
Her doctor had already told her that her fetus had severe abnormalities and would almost certainly die in the womb. If it made it to term, life expectancy was a year, at most. At 22 weeks pregnant, Ms. Sajbor had been admitted to a hospital after her water broke prematurely.
She knew that there was a short window to induce birth or surgically remove the fetus to avert infection and potentially fatal sepsis. But even as she developed a fever, vomited and convulsed on the floor, it seemed to be the baby’s heartbeat that the doctors were most concerned about.
“My life is in danger,” she wrote in a string of distressed text messages to her mother and husband that was shared with The New York Times by her family’s lawyer.
“They cannot help as long as the fetus is alive thanks to the anti-abortion law,” she wrote only hours before she died. “A woman is like an incubator.”
Abortion has seized the United States’ attention anew with the prospect that, as early as this month, the Supreme Court could overturn Roe v. Wade, the decision that has made the procedure terminating a pregnancy legal for nearly 50 years. If Roe is overturned, half of American women stand to lose legal access to abortion.
Poland offers a glimpse of a country where abortion is already practically out of reach even in the gravest circumstances. It has long been a showcase of the volatility and vicissitudes of the abortion battles — and how the lives of women and their doctors are tossed about on shifting social and political tides.
This is what the anti-abortion zealots are going for. Remember, to them, women are considered heroes if they give up their lives for the fetus.
I wrote this seven years ago:
Here’s just one example of how they are framing this:
When Elizabeth Joice found out she was pregnant, she was overcome with joy because doctors told her she would never be able to have children. But doctors then told her that she would be forced to make a decision to take the live of her unborn baby to begin cancer treatment or put her own life in danger by forgoing it.
Joice pondered whether she should join a club of other courageous women who decided to protect their unborn babies. Ultimately, saving her baby was an easy decision.
“Having a kid was one of the most important things in the world to her,” her husband Max told The Post at the time. “She said, ‘If we terminate the pregnancy and it turns out I can’t have a baby [later], I’ll be devastated. She knew this might be her only chance.”
Ultimately, Liz was only able to spend seven weeks with her daughter before she passed away.
“A courageous woman who decided to protect her unborn baby” — by choosing to die. That was her choice and her right, of course. But it’s a choice these people don’t want anyone else to have the right to make. Indeed, they are fetishizing the deaths of women like this as medieval martyrs.