Yet Another Real Life Story And Reason Why #Abortion Should NOT Be…

A longtime, and dear friend recently chose to share her own very personal story.

I share it here with her permission.

Though I am certain she would not object, I have chosen to omit her name.

The reader should be aware that Ethan is her and her husband’s young boy, and firstborn.

Used With Permission

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This is private, but I am going to put it out there to put a face on an issue for some of my friends.

On Tuesday, I lost two great sources of hope for the future. One was the election, but the other was more personal. Midday, before the polls ever closed, and right as I was returning one turf to Headquarters to pick up another, I got a phone call that brought me to my knees.

I was pregnant, ya’ll. I was 11 weeks on Election Day, and it had been a dicey start, but we thought we had made it. We were already discussing adorable ways to make it FB official. We anxiously awaited the results of this genetic test that would tell us the sex, so we could hopefully rest a bit easier if it was a girl (because of the pattern of kidney disease in my family).

The doc gently informed me that it was a little boy, and he had trisomy 18. Either I would naturally miscarry, or I would watch my baby die a slow and painful death over the course of a few days, months, or maybe a year. My worst nightmare was coming true, and I was terrified that I would find myself in the position of deciding to have an abortion because I could not morally or emotionally handle putting my baby and my family – especially Ethan- through that.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to make that call. The day after the election I started to miscarry, and this morning an ultrasound confirmed that he had died a couple of weeks ago. But if he hadn’t, I don’t know if I could have let him go just yet.  I might have waited to see if maybe the test was just wrong, and we could check again in another month. And then it would have been in “late term” abortion territory. And who knows what I would have done then but I am so grateful that I would have had the right to make that decision – not because I didn’t love this little baby that we wanted so badly, but because I loved him so much.

As painful as this process has been, i cannot overstate the relief I feel that I did not have to make that awful decision. And I cannot overstate the sympathy and compassion I feel for the women who do. And if you think that it’s worth putting a woman and her family through the horrific experience that we might have had, just for the sake of punishing other women who seek an abortion, then I strongly urge you to reset the frame in which you view this issue. No family should be forced to live that nightmare, and no child should be forced into this earth just to suffer.

And no person who has not walked a mile in the shoes of a woman forced to make such a decision should dare judge her for her choice, or deny her right to make it. That’s all.