Life in Gilead
By 
The email hit her inbox on Monday, September 26 at around 9 in the morning. “It’s so much worse than I imagined,” she wrote in her journal. “It’s trisomy 18. It’s Edwards Syndrome.” Online, she read that about 90% of fetuses with trisomy 18 die before birth, and those that do survive usually only live for a few days. “I just want to throw up. I can’t even come up with words to describe how devastating this is,” she wrote.
A few hours later, a genetic counselor called her. “It just gets worse,” she wrote after that conversation. “Basically, every day that Baby B continues to develop, he puts myself and his twin at greater risk for complications, preterm birth, etc. But she can’t say much – she was careful about what she even said.”
All that the genetic counselor told her was that, when she practiced in New York, doctors would do a “single fetal reduction,” Miller recalls, though she didn’t explain what that procedure was, only that “you can’t do that in Texas now.”
Miller felt like she knew why the genetic counselor was being so cryptic. Selective reduction is an abortion procedure for pregnancies with multiple fetuses. Doctors can selectively terminate one fetus, while another or multiple other fetuses continue to develop. Multiple pregnancies are inherently risky, and selective reduction can increase the chance of a live birth or births.
But now, almost all abortions are illegal in Texas.
In fact, there are three laws banning abortion in the state. One predated Roe v. Wade, dating back as far as 1857. Another was triggered when Roe was overturned and comes with a maximum penalty of life in prison for performing an abortion in the state. Then there’s SB-8, that allows people to bring civil charges for “aiding or abetting” a Texas abortion.
Miller says she felt the laws were preventing her doctor and the genetic counselor from telling her all her options in a straightforward way. “Nowadays, with the way we got this bounty hunter system in Texas, doctors are going to err on the side of caution,” she says.
Time for another Amy Coney Barrett monologue about how abortion bans are no big deal because you can just drop the baby off at the bus station, and since babies are just born immediately after conception with no health complications that solves everything.