WARNING: This article contains intense imagery.

Nature frequently goes awry. Who knows why some cells metastasize into cancer, or why a fetus doesn’t properly develop? Such are the mysteries that medicine is challenged by and seeks to answer. in many states, the law will not allow an abortion for any reason past a certain point — even if the fetus is so totally deformed that it has no chance to live. This is the story of such an incident. The author is a doctor, writing anonymously, and the article was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Business Insider wrote an article on this story  and that is where I found it. I cite and link to both sources deliberately so that there is no question whether this is true. This is all too painfully real. This is a tale of human misery that medicine could have averted, but for the fact that a warped political system decrees that mercy be denied and the inhumane go forward.

You are in OB triage, crammed on a stool between the woman’s stretcher and the wall. When you move, the stool squeals. Her hand rubs her belly….The interpreter is a stranger on a screen, mounted to a pole on wheels. You try to angle the screen so the interpreter sees your face. He is aghast at what you ask him to repeat. The cadence of your words is carefully measured, but your beautiful cadence is mangled by his hesitation.
You wait for the patient to break the silence. The baby’s heartbeat trots through the monitors while you softly hold her gaze. Her eyes plead with you. End it. You talk to the obstetricians, because eventually it will end. But nobody will do it. Not in this state. Not in this hospital. And so, the mother goes home, pregnant and grieving.
She returns a few days later. She’s having a miscarriage. Her labor is managed just like that, like labor. The baby is born with no skull, eyes like gumballs too big for their sockets. Alive, briefly. It hurts to look. Grotesque is all you can think, but you cannot say it. Thinking it calms you inside so you can calm everyone else. That is your job. To lead, to calm. Because everyone is upset. Some of the nurses need you to fix it, to save this baby with the magic of medicine. You remind them that he is very premature, that he has no brain, that he cannot survive. This is not an ambiguous diagnosis. You encourage the mother to hold her child, but she does not want this bond. She cannot see the deformed creature she birthed, because once seen it cannot be unseen.
The woman in this story was “heavily pregnant” when the doctor first saw her, although the article doesn’t specify if she was past the 23 week viability window, before which a pregnancy is legal to terminate, according to Roe v. Wade. As you see, she didn’t speak English and she likely didn’t have any pre-natal care when she became pregnant. Therefore, the condition of the fetus was not diagnosed earlier and the pregnancy continued to an advanced stage. There are 43 states in the U.S. that ban “late term” abortions, even in a case like this.Technically, a late term abortion is an abortion done past the due date, but it is used in common parlance to describe abortions after 21 weeks. And some current laws, like the one just passed in Alabama, would make any abortion illegal after the first six weeks, a time when, in the real world, most women don’t even know they’re pregnant.
The doctor who wrote this piece stated that he has “commanded millions of health care dollars [spent] on behalf of infants born with fatal diagnoses.” How can that be justified?
At least when a horse breaks it’s leg and it’s life is no longer viable, we shoot it. We do so out of mercy. Why in the world do we have draconian laws in place which deny mercy to an the mother of an un-viable fetus?
The doctor said he directed millions of health care dollars to be spent futilely, wasted,  because of laws that do not address these medical realities. He said nothing of the cost of human misery, which cannot be measured in dollars — but which, on these facts, is utterly staggering as well. This is inhumane and unnatural to ask a woman to go through something like this.
This is madness. This is not pro-life. By any sane analysis, this is anti-life.

 

 

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1 COMMENT

    • Exactly. I can’t remember the name of a Melanie Griffith movie right now, but it’s the one where she was carrying around her husband’s head in a hat box. Did you ever see this? Anyhow, at the trial, she talks about how he would get her pregnant and keep her pregnant, sabotage her birth control, on and on. This abortion issue reduces women to their lowest common denominator, which is their reproductive function. It is about control, nothing more. Misogyny runs deep.

  1. In his purposefully Group Of Pricks manipulated statement, Governor Northam spoke of babies born with their internal organs on the outside of their bodies or born without brains…..is this what they want???…..infants suffering these conditions. That is no life because they can not live and will die horribly.

    They seem to revel in showing pictures of aborted fetal tissue…..I wonder their reaction to pics of the above mentioned circumstances.

    Everything to these “people” is in their minds back and white, with no room for compromise, while rational people realize it’s a gray world and there are ALWAYS exceptions.

  2. Their tirades of, “heart felt”, justification for NOT permitting abortions for ANY reason, comes with a formidable backing of RWNJ’s, with lots of money and old school bizarre and outrageous contentions that have no place in our courts and Congress …. the woman and her doctor need to be the decision makers … there are a barrage of tests and pointers that can tell these two responsible people just what is happening and the probable outcome for full term delivery …

    It has always boggled my mind that politicians and religious zealots seem to think THEY are smarter then medical doctors and the life of any woman … no room for any other out come, no matter the horrific evidence easily produced …

  3. One of their biggest hypocrisies is referring to post-20-week bans as “pain capable unborn children bans,” something there’s no scientific support for, while at the same time wanting to force women to give birth to several deformed infants who will suffer horrible, short lives.

    • Most of them seem to believe that embryos and fetuses are just younger, smaller versions of babies – they have no understanding of development, even the women who push these laws – they also al think it will never happen to them or to anyone they know.

      • They don’t want to understand. The women who push these laws see themselves as “good” “Christian” women, and believe these laws are needed to keep the “sluts” in line. Then of course when they or their daughter gets pregnant it’s “different” — their lives can’t be ruined by a “mistake.”

    • Ironically, many of the same people so willing to claim that fetuses feel pain and promote the myth of the “silent scream” are quick to pooh-pooh any notion that male infants actually feel any kind of pain during circumcision or, if they *do* feel pain, it’s just temporary and not worth considering. (Even more ironically, circumcision on adult men is usually a serious operation that can require several weeks for full healing to complete–not to mention the potential necessity for general anesthesia; there are other options but that’s really not an area that men really enjoy thinking about subjecting to potential pain.)

  4. It’s almost like a death cult … providing another acronym for GOP: Ghouls On Parade….

    But seriously, this fits with their obsession about women’s “purity” — in which women are only considered “good” and “pure” if they are suffering. So yay, they’re found another way to legislate more suffering for women { insert eyeroll emoticon }

    • I agree, to at least the, “CULT”, reference … this has turned into a mob action across the country, same message different states, flows right into their lawmakers offices … once started, it mutated into a full blown virus … seeing it work in one state, the plan knee jerks into the local reps of the right to lifers that have nothing in their plan for during, after, or long term support of these terribly unfortunate births of severely deformed or brainless baby’s … nor those of young girls who have no means of support or money for raising a child much less the delivery at a qualified clinic or hospital … kids raped having the child of a felon, kids having kids before they can get a driver’s license … after the 9 months of total hell, they might even have to have a C-Section, just another day of hell for a very young mother, who might be so despondent that she would harm herself …

      If they expect a law of this nature to stand, then they sure as heck better be prepared to support these resultant babies as well as the unwanted products of a vicious, vile rape of an underage girl that happens to be fertile and becomes pregnant at 9-10 years old … paying every penny for the care of the victim, through mental health problems as well as nightmares of the attack, and a growing unwanted baby stretching her small frame into a painful, in her face reminder of every second of his attack … which will scar her forever … these people should see what these rules really would do to one of their own children or one of their neighbor’s kids … they are not even talking about the possibility of millions and billions of follow up care needed …

  5. First, another ANONYMOUS pile of BS. Zero proof this actually happened. For all we know this is written by an abortion clinic doctor trying to save his profession.

    Second, MILLIONS of completely viable babies are killed without a second thought…in fact MANY of these same self-absorbed a-holes have been grotesquely CELEBRATING the fact that they have had so many abortions. A completely disgusting action yet you want us to have pity on them? Nonsense. They irresponsibly do screw around and then don’t take responsibilty for their actions…if Preg they simply kill the only innocent involved.

    Third, you did this yourself… SO many of you would NOT even consider restrictions on abortion even up to the last minutes before birth. You DEMANDED that your practice of dragging a completely intact, viable baby out of a womb(all but the head) and then stabbing a tool into its skull to suck the brains out should have NO restrictions. Because you REFUSED to put some form of reasonable restrictions on this draconian practice what other choice did opponents have but to end them ALL? So you a-holes CAUSED the new far MORE restrictive laws taking effect because you wanted those who irresponsibly waited to the last possible seconds to kill the child instead of a more reasonable policy which would have allowed for what this fantasy story of your claims. So you morons have no one to blame but yourselves.

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