They simply do not care about the people who are already living, especially the pregnant ones
Can they not understand how incredibly complicated these decisions are? How grotesque it is to think they are in a position to dictate them to others?
Kaitlyn was near the beginning of her second trimester last October when she boarded a plane from Texas to Kansas. On her return home a few days later, she was no longer pregnant, and the 34-year-old wanted to do little more than cry in her own bed. Being in public was a struggle, let alone standing in line and going through airport security.
She had flown to Kansas for an abortion that was outlawed in her home state, though she and her doctor considered it medically appropriate. Scans had shown the fetus inside her had a lethal form of skeletal dysplasia. If it survived childbirth, which was extremely unlikely, doctors expected the newborn to soon suffocate from under-developed lungs. The baby’s bones would be so brittle, they would break just from being held.
Kaitlyn and her husband got the news shortly after Texas passed a highly restrictive abortion law, banning the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy except in medical emergencies. Her own doctor was so afraid of being sued, he didn’t bring up the possibility of ending the pregnancy. But if Kaitlyn didn’t have the ability to travel for an abortion, she doesn’t know if she would have survived.
“The psychological burden would have been so high and I would have been so hormonal and emotional, I don’t know what could have happened,” she told STAT, which agreed to use only her first name because she fears repercussions for those who helped her if she’s identified. Kaitlyn had postpartum depression before, after she gave birth to her first son. The prospect of carrying a fetus that was destined for suffering and death was unfathomable. “I don’t know if I could have got up and gone to work with that baby inside of me for seven months,” she said. “I could see suicide being an option.”
Texas’s exception permitting abortion in medical emergencies likely wouldn’t apply to a circumstance like Katilyn’s, where death isn’t imminent. After the Supreme Court’s impending abortion ruling, whether it repeals Roe v. Wade outright or stops just short of that, several states are expected to pass laws that allow abortion only to save a pregnant person’s life. Some 22 states are certain to ban abortion following a repeal of Roe, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think tank, and a further four are highly likely to follow, with exemptions granted in limited medical emergencies.
Another one:
Daniel and Taylor Mahaffey were 20 weeks pregnant and desperately wanted their child, but when doctors informed them a complication meant the fetus had no chance of survival, they just wanted their baby’s suffering to end. Yet because of their state’s “fetal pain” law, the married Texans say they were forced to endure a stillbirth and wait as their baby slowly died in utero.
The Mahaffeys had begun decorating the nursery in anticipation for the little boy they planned to name Fox, after one of the Lost Boys in Peter Pan.
On Wednesday night, Taylor, 23, felt something abnormal and since their last pregnancy ended in miscarriage, they rushed to the hospital. By the time they got there, Fox’s feet were already pushing through his mother’s cervix. Doctors tried several emergency measures to stop the preterm labor, including putting Taylor on an incline in the hopes that they could perform a cervical cerclage—a procedure in which doctors stitch shut the cervix. Nothing worked. Nothing could save him.
Heartbroken, the Mahaffeys asked about their options. “The only humane thing to do at that point would be to pop the sack, and let little Fox come into this world too early to survive outside,” 29-year-old Daniel Mahaffey wrote Monday, telling his story on Reddit.
The doctors and nurses at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin cried with them, but said because of Texas law HB2, they could not help speed Taylor’s labor. Technically, the baby was healthy and the mother was healthy, so to induce labor would be an abortion, and to do it at this stage in the pregnancy would be illegal.
The Mahaffeys were sent home to wait for their baby to die or for Taylor’s labor to progress. “We cried ourselves to sleep, waiting for him to come,” Daniel said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
They prayed conflicting prayers: for a miracle that might save him and for an end to their baby’s suffering. Daniel worried his wife would hemorrhage while Taylor could feel the baby struggling inside of her, Daniel said. Taylor declined to speak for this article.
When Taylor started bleeding, they went back to the hospital, but with Fox’s heart still beating, doctors couldn’t legally interfere.
“Eventually she was just screaming at them to get the child out of her,” Daniel said.
After four days in and out of the hospital, the bag of waters surrounding their baby burst and Taylor delivered Fox. “One nice thing is we got to hold him,” Daniel said. “That’s the only silver lining.”
Texas is one of 12 states that bans abortions after 20 weeks post fertilization with bills ostensibly based on the wholly unscientific idea that fetuses can feel pain after that period of gestation. (A review of the evidence by the American Medical Association found that “fetal perception of pain is unlikely before the third trimester.”)
These ghouls think it makes sense for every single pregnancy to be subject to the whims of yahoo bureaucrats and religious fanatics in every state who thinks this is their choice. It’s a nightmare.