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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]June 24, the day the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health,was my 40th birthday.  I was able to celebrate because abortion saved my life.

In September 2020, I had my 20 week anatomy scan for a pregnancy we very much wanted.  That the fetus’s kidneys and lungs were not developing, there was fluid around the heart, I had no amniotic fluid, and my placenta was severely degraded.  All my doctors agreed, the only choice was to terminate my pregnancy.

Thankfully, in MD and DC, abortion up to 24 weeks was legal.  Even so, I had to jump through many stressful, challenging hoops:  [b]switching doctors to a practice who would perform the procedure[/b]; navigating Hyde Amendment restrictions on my Federal employee insurance; and being alone at appointments because of Covid restrictions.

I am thankful every day that I was able to get the care I needed at a hospital with an experienced and compassionate medical team.  The  the doctors could not stop me from  bleeding after the procedure.  I went into hypovolemic shock, lost 3x the amount of blood in my body, and formed blood clots in my hand and foot.  I woke up with a breathing tube in the ICU, all alone and in excruciating pain.  But I was alive.  I was in the ICU for 8 days.

The decision in Dobbs means that pregnant woman like me will die.  Even in states that provide exception for “life of the mother,” when abortion is so severely restricted, the care is not actually available.   Who gets to decide how likely it is that I’m going to die before I get the medical care I need? How will doctors be able to provide the care we need to save our lives?

All abortion is, in some way, to save the life of the mother.  I share my story as one example of the repercussions of denying reproductive health care to us.

[/quote]

Here's what I genuinely don't understand. If this procedure is medically necessary (and I don't doubt that it is), why are only certain ob/gyns willing or able to perform it? Is it because it is so complicated to learn (I'm dubious, given the other procedures these doctors offer and the emergencies they handle)(, because it is so rare (again, not an excuse; I assume your doctors would have treated you if you had spontaneously begun to abort), or for some other reason?

You suggest it was because of abortion restrictions, so do you think it was genuinely because your doctors were afraid of performing this procedure because of legal consequences?

Obviously we are going to need some very courageous doctors who feel confident that they can defend their decisions in court if this is the case.

The same advances in technology that the pro-life side argues defends their position can also be used to argue for lack of viability.

I think however that, for most pro-lifers, they are actually just bringing up the "health of the mother" argument to try to argue that ANY limits on abortion are dangerous to women, and whether this is true or not, it immediately goes back to the "all or nothing" argument that is actually not something most Americans favor. (Most Americans are pro-choice, but many-- me included-- are uncomfortable with the idea that allowing an ob/gyn to decide when to terminate a pregnancy for health reasons could extend to allowing a woman who is twenty weeks pregnant with a healthy baby to terminate that pregnancy at a clinic where she never actually consults with her own ob/gyn. Fortunately, I think the latter is very rare, but I'm not sure that's an argument for allowing it to ever happen, and I'm not convinced it's legally impossible to distinguish between these occurrences. That is why I go back to the fact that your own doctor would not perform the procedure-- if the same people who deliver our babies had been tasked with performing abortions instead of doctors whose sole job is abortions and often never see the woman undergoing an abortion prior to or after the procedure, it seems to me women with medical issues would be safer and less affected by the nationwide debate over life. Then again, it would also make abortion a lot less accessible-- and so we have to be honest about what we really want. If what we really want is accessible abortion, for any reason, at any time, it requires a different kind of approach. Because even most pro-lifers are on our side with the health of the mother/rape/incest but most pro-choicers get uncomfortable when we begin talking about healthy babies in the second or third trimesters.[/quote]

I don’t understand wtf you are trying to say, but you sound like a dude who doesn’t really believe pregnancy is dangerous and that it is reasonable to make a woman with a dangerous pregnancy wait a couple of weeks while you debate whether or not she deserves an abortion. [/quote]

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