Originally written and shared on Facebook in October 2016.
I was — and am still — uncertain about sharing this.
Today I picked up baby Flora’s remains. 23 days ago I had an abortion at 22 weeks. 37 days ago, I learned my baby had almost no brain.
For two weeks, I weighed the balance between the life of my much wanted and much loved little girl against the suffering that life would bring.
What it would really be like to have a child that may never be self aware? Would my child, as an adult, be neglected and abused when I was no longer there to protect her? Would she experience sexual abuse because a child’s mind in a woman’s body is an easy target? Would I be able to live through a pregnancy constantly wondering if my beloved baby would die?
I wished against my deepest desires that my sweet darling would die soon to take the choice away from me. I hoped one of the doctors would utter the phrase “incompatible with life” to get rid of the uncertainties.
My husband and I thought through many scenarios and the impact that this baby, if she even lived, would have on our first daughter, on our marriage, on him, on our financial stability, and least of all, on myself. We had only unknown probabilities and most likely scenarios based on sparse and imprecise data. I do not even have the comfort of knowing that my baby’s life, if she had survived to birth, would have certainly brought mostly hardship and pain; I can only say that such an outcome was most likely.
Until you’ve thought through these types of scenarios, not in the abstract but as a choice you have to make — and make quickly — you probably won’t understand how heartbreaking it is. Every angle I took on the problem — emotional or rational, focused on the baby or on our family — led to the same conclusion: the most loving and compassionate thing we could do is let her go.
Some might yell at me for using a euphemism, “let her go”. They might tell me to say what I mean — terminate my baby, abort my baby, kill my baby, murder my baby. These terms hurt. They hurt not because I feel guilt but because I hated having to make this choice at all. But as much as it hurts, none of the guilt you throw at me hurts as much as the pain of choosing for my baby to die.
Late term abortion is a terrible thing, and it is most terrible to the parents who have to make these heartbreaking choices. We have to make the terrible decision about where to draw the line between life and death. We won’t all draw the line in the same place, but it’s better to have parents draw this line, parents who for the most part will try to draw the line as much in favor of life as they possibly can, than to have it be drawn by politicians and bureaucrats based on what will win the most votes.