They aborted late in their pregnancy. These are their stories

Because many states impose gestational age limits for abortions and refuse to take out pregnancy insurance, women who have abortions later in their pregnancy have few options. They often need to travel, which increases the cost of what can be a prohibitive procedure.

One woman said that she felt punished – again – for the loss of her son each time she was paying the monthly loan payment on the thousands of dollars that she had borrowed for the first time. # 39; abortion. It was a decision she thought did not have any other choice than to take; the boy in his belly lacked several organs and would never have survived.

Some women insist on being named, refusing to hide. Others want to use only first names or pseudonyms, fearing retaliation at a time when people seem to hate more than listening.

But by sharing their stories, these women – some of whom are mentioned above, others mentioned below – hope to humanize a subject that is the subject of intense debate and, they say, seriously misunderstood.

She had to choose how her daughter was going to die

When people ask her how many children she has, Dana Weinstein tells them that she has three children alive. This is because the girl she lost 9 and a half years ago is still part of her.

She was happy married, mother of a 2 year old boy and pleased to be pregnant again. She read stories and writes a diary to the baby. She loved when her son rolled his little cars on his growing belly. Since she was over 35 and was "of advanced maternal age," she said, her care included additional sonograms later in her pregnancy.

When she and her husband came in for one to 29 weeks, they were told that the ventricles, or network of cavities, in their baby's brain were larger than normal, she said. The doctor and the technician said that they were not "overly rude," Weinstein remembered, so she was not worried. They could cope with everything that was happening, they reasoned, her husband and she. Plus, the rest of their baby was perfect.

Despite everything, she was sent to the National Children's in Washington for further testing. Weinstein, who lives in Rockville, Maryland, was 31 weeks old, well into his third trimester when they got an appointment. Then came the punch.

There are words that are difficult to spell for the brain abnormalities of their baby: agenesis of the corpus callosum and polymicrogyria. In simpler terms, as Weinstein described, a special MRI showed that the baby did not have the part of the brain that connects the right and left hemispheres. And where a healthy brain "looks like a cauliflower," she said, their baby's brain had concave areas and "pockets of emptiness."

"What does it mean? What does it mean?" she kept asking, before they were taken to specialists who could explain.

Doctors were waiting for their baby to not suck or swallow, Weinstein said. They said that she would probably suffer from uncontrollable seizures at birth and that, for this reason, a resuscitation order would be necessary. The doctors had predicted that their baby would need medical intervention throughout his life.

And, as Weinstein understood, she would have no mental capacity to dream, to love or to enjoy life.

His questions came quickly. Rehabilitation could not help? And if they were taking stem cells into the umbilical cord blood of her son that she had accumulated? Maybe they could push back what his daughter needed?

The brain of their baby was destined to be so from the beginning, experts said. It could not have been detected earlier and would not improve. They could never have seen it coming. The multiple doctors she interviewed, looking for hope, told her the same thing.

"It's only a stroke of luck," said Weinstein. "Basically, anyone who could get pregnant could be that lucky."

They heard about what a resuscitation order would involve. They listened to what an existence, ephemeral or otherwise, would look like. They were informed about palliative care.

At first, no one talked about the possibility of abortions so late in her pregnancy. Weinstein thinks this is partly because Dr. George Tiller, of Wichita, Kansas, was murdered by a doctor to whom the hospital had sent rare patients like her in the past weeks before.

She could carry the baby for another six weeks and have him come, they tell him. But this prolonged the nightmare in which she lived, she said, in which they had to choose the mode of death of their daughter. She was worried that their choice would be for their son, their family, their marriage.

The endless kicks in Weinstein's belly, the persistent movements that had brought him so much joy have become unbearable. She feared that the baby would just grab it and, worse yet, suffer. She collapsed and could not sleep. While she had proudly worn pretty maternity clothes to show off her hump, she's now hidden in her husband's clothes. She dreaded the well-meaning question of strangers – "When are you right?" – and refused to leave the house.

"That agony every moment until I could end his pain was horrible," Weinstein said. Together with her husband, they decided to have an abortion. For that baby that they loved, she said, it sounded like "a more peaceful way for her passing".

She had to cross the country to get to Colorado to get the procedure. She felt lucky to have supportive parents who were able to charge the abortion expense, or $ 17,500, on their credit card. She traveled with her husband, mother and son to be able to hold him during his stay at the hotel.

The doctor used a sonogram to find the baby's heart. He administered an injection to Weinstein through the stomach to stop beating. She felt the last movements of her daughter before her death. A few days later, on the very day of her 32nd week of pregnancy, she gave birth to their dead baby.

"I will not talk about that," said Weinstein, who remained calm on the phone but predicted that she would break down just after we hung up. "But I would like to say that it was not a baby tearing itself apart … I gave birth to a beautiful, beautiful baby."

Now 47, she and her husband had two healthy daughters. The first, now 8 years old, calls Weinstein: his "baby rainbow".

"We call it that," she says, "because after a storm, what's more beautiful than a rainbow?"

The end of her pregnancy saved her life

The swelling was the first sign that something was wrong. He appeared in his hands and feet. She had trouble sneaking into her shoes.

Susan opened her book "What to expect when we're waiting" and turned to the section that described when to call a doctor. Her kind of sudden swelling and weight gain – she had taken 11 pounds in a week – was on the list.

She asked her husband, who had been a doctor for a little over a year, that he thought she looked good. He gently told her that she was beautiful, thinking first that she was aware of herself and that she was afraid of being fat.

He was not a gynecologist, so she called hers.

"Ask your husband to take your blood pressure just when he is able to," the doctor advised.

On his way to Berkeley, California that night, he suggested that they go to his office first.

Her blood pressure "was out of the ordinary," Susan recalls 30 years later. Her husband called the obstetrician, who asked him if he had urine test strips on hand. He did and they showed that Susan's protein levels were dangerously high, indicating a problem with her kidneys.

"Go right to the hospital," ordered the obstetrician.

Susan hesitated at first. She felt good, just swollen. Besides, she was hungry.

"Can not we go to dinner first?" she asked before being rushed to the door.

She remained in denial for as long as she could. The doctors worried about her blood pressure, but she was not. They said that his kidneys were closing, but that was not recorded. Instead, she focused on the ultrasound they took, which revealed the baby's gender.

She looked at her husband with excitement.

"Oh, my God, we're going to have a boy!" she says. "Are not you happy?"

Her face was dark, she remembered. "He knew that did not seem to go at all."

"It's as if you were poisoned by your pregnancy," she explained, explaining her condition. "The only way to cure him is to not be pregnant."

The fetus was late in its development and not where it should be at 24 weeks.

It "needs at least two weeks to be viable at a minimum, and you do not have two weeks," the doctors told them. "You do not have two days."

Yet she tried to negotiate an agreement. She was a physical therapist. She could readjust after a stroke, she tells them. She could rehabilitate their baby. She wanted to give it to her, if not vaginally, then by caesarean section. They said that his body could not stand either.

They promised him that the fetus would not feel pain before he stopped beating his heart. Then they put Susan on hand to perform the dilation and evacuation procedure, in which the cervix is ​​dilated and the contents of the uterus extracted.

Her abortion was a necessity and seemed to be "such a choice as not to choose," said Susan, 59, who later had two daughters.

It was not what she wanted. It was what she needed to live.

His biological mother abandoned him. She refused to do the same thing

She was 19 years old and lived in a Florida foster family when she learned that she was pregnant.

"Katherine", this is not her real name, was in the United States with a student visa. She is from Honduras, where the ban on abortion is totally forbidden, and she became pregnant in the summer while visiting the house.

She was confused, though. The older man with whom she had gone to Honduras bought a Plan B pill at the black market, she said, and told her to take it. She did not know what it was nor how it worked. When she did not have her period, she assumed that her hormones were completely skeptical because of this strange pill.

After a few months back in the United States, however, his body was different. The home pregnancy test she bought at Walmart was positive, but she clung to the plot of the film she had seen where the tests had given false results.

When the father of her foster family asked her if she was pregnant, she replied, "No. Why do you ask?"

She was terrified and did not know where to turn. She told the man she was dating in Honduras that she was pregnant, "but he did not support me," she said. "He said" I'm plugging it. "

She did not want to disappoint her family at home. If her family in Florida learned the truth, she feared, they would send her away. Katherine had dreams, she said, that depended on her stay at the university.

She could barely concentrate during her final exams – "It was the worst semester of my life," she said – then she moved to Texas to be transferred to a new school.

In the Lone Star State, she felt even more alone. She said that she did not know anyone. At the end of January 2016, she understood: she could not have this baby.

She remembered hearing about a man from her neighborhood, Honduras, who had secretly practiced abortion, but she could not figure out who he was. She learned that abortions were legal in the United States, but she feared she could never afford one. Then she started looking for options in Texas and found a place near her home. Even better, when she called, she was promised a free pregnancy test and ultrasound.

The clinic first made him watch a video. She remembered God, adoption and parenthood. It featured women who shared testimonials about the abortions they regretted. Katherine looked but did not understand their sadness. Without knowing it, she had entered a denominational clinic that did not offer abortions. She attended the video to which she did not adhere because, she said, "I just wanted help."

The ultrasound showed that she was at 30 weeks away, farther than expected.

"There is a place where they can pay for your education, and you can stay there to get the baby," Katherine, a woman at the clinic, recalled.

It may have been an option, she thought at first, but it was not what she wanted. She would only bring a baby to the world that he had his parents, both of them. She was not ready to raise a child. And she was driving it first: she refused to look like her own biological mother, who had abandoned her at the hospital after she was born.

"It's not the purpose of my life, to repeat the same story," she said. "I did not want my baby to feel the same as me … I'm 23 years old and I always ask these questions about what happened."

She insisted that she wanted an abortion.

"In Texas, it's illegal for you to have an abortion after 20 weeks," the woman told the clinic. "You will have to have the baby."

The woman asked if she wanted her ultrasound images. Katherine said she did not do it. The woman gave them all the same. As soon as she came home, she threw them and sobbed.

Then she became frenzied. She went online to research where she could go and found only two options. She called a clinic in New Mexico, which directed her to a sister clinic in Texas for an examination. This clinic confirmed how well she was and heard her supplications. They could not give her what she wanted, however, but called New Mexico for her.

They are "willing to help you," she recalls hearing. "But it's going to cost you $ 12,000."

Given his current path, his appointment was quickly included in the program. She had only three days to find the money, she said.

She worked on the phone and pulled emails. With the help of a network of abortion funds that support women who can not afford these procedures, Katherine said she had raised $ 9,000. She begged the New Mexico clinic to take her away again.

A third-trimester abortion provider in New Mexico, who did not want to be named and could not speak directly to Katherine's case, proposed that to explain why a person like her would be accepted for the procedure.

"My patients, regardless of their gestational age, share this commonality: regardless of their history, they decided that an abortion was absolutely necessary to preserve their mental or physical health and / or to save their unborn child. from a life of suffering "doctor writes in an email.

Katherine was in a nervous mist the day she walked through the doors of the clinic. She did not remember the injection that had stopped the fetal heart rate. She also could not name the medications she had been given, but she certainly remembered the cramps that had seized her body later in the hotel. Only afterwards did she realize that she had started work.

"I had pain, you can not imagine, I wanted to die," she said. "With this pain, I really regretted having an abortion."

But this regret was short-lived. Two days later, when she "gave birth to a dead fetus" at the clinic, tears of relief invaded her.

"Thank you for changing my future," she remembered.

Katherine, who to date has never told her friend or family member about her abortion, knows that some people can read her story and think the worst of it. But it's her body, her life and she knew what she could – and could not – handle, she said.

She is baffled by the outcry against abortion. She thinks of all the children in the United States and elsewhere who do not have a loving home and have no chance to do so.

"Do you want the orphanages to have more children?" she asks. "Do you want more kids on the street?"

She is anxious to be a mother someday, she insists. But she will do it with a supportive partner when she is older, maybe 30, when she will become the woman she plans to be.