A Primary Target in the War on Reproductive Freedom Speaks

Jia Tolentino’s interview with a woman who aborted a non-viable fetus at the 32nd week of pregnancy is amazing:

Did you consider carrying to term despite that?

This is another fun side note. I was already going to have to have a C-section no matter what, because two years ago, I’d had brain surgery. And my doctor checked with the neurosurgeon, who wouldn’t sign off on a natural birth. They were afraid that if I pushed, something might go on in my head, so the delivery had to be a C-section. And so we were considering putting me through major abdominal surgery for a baby that’s not going to make it, or risking that I go into natural labor and something pops in my head and I die, basically.

To be clear, if the doctors thought there was any way he might make it, I would have taken that chance. I truly would have put myself through anything. What I came to accept was the fact that I would never get to be this little guy’s mother—that if we came to term, he would likely live a very short time until he choked and died, if he even made it that far. This was a no-go for me. I couldn’t put him through that suffering when we had the option to minimize his pain as much as possible.

So you’re going to Colorado.

There are a few doctors in the country—four of them, you interviewed one of them—who will do this. But my doctor had previously referred patients to Dr. Hern, who’s in Boulder. He’s this 78-year-old man who’s been doing this for decades, who developed a lot of the abortion procedures that we know to be the most safe. He’s had 37,000 patients and he’s never lost anyone. And he’s a zealot, but he has to be. There are websites dedicated to offering money to kill him; his practice has four layers of bulletproof glass. They’ve been shot at. He was there during the Roe v. Wade decision. He’s been through it all. And the only other peer he had at his level was Dr. Tiller, who was killed in 2009.

In theory, legal restrictions on post-viability abortions are more defensible than those on pre-viability abortions. But whenever I ask what’s practically wrong with Canada’s regime, which leaves the judgment to a woman and her doctor at every stage of pregnancy, I basically get a series of buzzes and pops in response. The idea that later-term abortions are too easy to obtain in the United States is…not easy to defend. Indeed, anti-abortion terrorism has made obtaining late-term abortions anybody but the most hardcore anti-abortion fanatic would concede are medically justifiable enormously difficult.