Personal, hard decisions

“The Elf”:http://www.elfnoodles.com/ is frequently exhausted, but otherwise fine. She’s even “posted herself about getting pregnant”:http://www.elfnoodles.com/wordpress/?p=248. We’re keeping our fingers crossed. As far as we know, everything is fine. But we’re anxious nonetheless.

It’s partly the fault of all the pregnancy books which do such a great job of telling you how many ways things can go wrong. A lot of this was never covered in my high school health classes, despite the fact that the sex ed there was better than what most of my fellow high-school students elsewhere in Virginia received.

The rest of this discussion is certainly not cheerful, though, so you may not want to follow the jump…

One thing my red-with-embarrassment coach didn’t teach us — for fear it might increase incidences of teen sex, I suppose — was just how many pregnancies fail in the first half of the first trimester. A number of books we’ve looked at say the failure rate is around _50%_ for pregnancies detected in the fourth week[1]. By six weeks, that drops to 15% — one in six. By eight, that drops to 5%, or one in twenty. One in twenty still feels like uncomfortably bad odds.

I can’t help being reminded of “this New York Times story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html?ex=1302235200&en=d855d80018cd6c56&ei=5088&partner=rssuserland about the complete abortion ban in El Salvador, where any failed pregnancy can be scrutinized, by court order, for evidence of abortion. My concern here is not unfounded: “Virginia H. B. 1677″:http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?051+ful+HB1677, proposed in 2004 and “pulled in 2005″:http://democracyforvirginia.typepad.com/democracy_for_virginia/2005/01/breaking_cosgro.html would have required reporting fetal miscarriages to law enforcement within twelve hours — something that strikes me as the thin end of the El Salvador wedge. I can imagine many terrible experiences, but few worse than having to convince a police officer or court that we did *not* abort a child we wanted very much.

Along those same lines, however, is what happens if something *else* goes wrong with the pregnancy. Long enough ago that I’ve now lost the link[2] I remember reading a story about a couple whose child died _en utero_. The mother was given the choice between carrying the corpse to term — until the body decided to give up on it — or to go to a clinic to have the failed pregnancy technically “aborted.” Understandably opting for the latter, they were faced at the clinic by protesters screaming at the mother not to kill her already dead baby.

Spend a moment on that: already devastated by the unplanned and unpreventable loss of a child they _wanted_, they had to endure being screamed at by strangers who did not understand the circumstances but felt free to condemn the couple anyway.

That’s bad enough, but if there was a general abortion ban would this option even be open? Even if it was _legally_ allowed in this case, would there — after a decade or two — even be anyone qualified to perform one?

There are other times when an abortion is a medical decision rather than a means of birth control, and the idea of having to justify our choices to people who are a) not doctors and b) operate from a significantly different religious perspective than we do frankly gives me chills. Bans and proposed bans range from absolute (in El Salvador) to “except to save the life of the mother” (South Dakota) to “except to save the life and health of the mother.” In South Dakota, does an “ectopic pregnancy”:http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/pregnancy_newborn/pregnancy/ectopic.html count? And at what point will it convince a state-appointed judge or Christian medical ethicist that an otherwise medically necessary procedure should be allowed?

And while I certainly hope we never have to make such a decision, what about pregnancies which result in a child with profound mental and physical handicaps? This may not necessarily endanger the life of the mother, but it is a significant financial and emotional burden that a family may not be prepared for and the state or federal government may not be willing to assist with. Surely, in such circumstances, abortion seems like a credible option. But it would almost certainly be seen as an elective procedure, and have to go through the aforementioned medical ethicist. It’s a hard enough decision to make without having to drag lawyers and the medical and science expertise of “Rick Santorum”:http://www.santorumexposed.com/pages/video/stemcells.php into it.

fn1. Confusingly, that’s about two weeks after conception; pregnancies are dated from the date of the mother’s last period, which is roughly two weeks before conception can begin.

fn2. If you can help me find this link, please do.