Blog for choice day

[boxofdelights]

This is a painful anniversary for me. Nineteen years + one week ago, I was nearing the end of my first pregnancy. I was fretting over the phrase, "An active baby is a healthy baby," because my baby was not moving as much as he used to. I told my doctor that at each of the previous two visits. Each time, he listened to the baby's heartbeat for fifteen seconds, and told me the baby was fine.

January 17, 1991, I had what I now recognize as a high blood pressure spike, followed by a migraine. I think that was when my baby died. January 18 I learned that the baby was dead. January 21 I checked into the hospital for induction of labor. January 22, I had had a baby, but I didn't have a baby.

I was so bewildered, that week. None of the reading I had done -- and, you know, I read a lot -- was helpful. The only relevant sentence I found was in Our Bodies, Ourselves: fetal death in the first two trimesters was called miscarriage, but in the last trimester, when the fetus was viable, it was a stillbirth. That helped: what I was about to have was called a stillbirth. My childbirth prep instructor was helpful, but she didn't know any more than I did how my situation differed from a normal labor and delivery. My doctor (Steven Tippin, M.D., family practitioner and liar) told me that an induced labor and delivery was safest for me.

I don't know whether Dr. Tippin was lying or just ignorant. I know he lied to me about other things, during and after the procedure, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he was telling me falsehoods without even knowing that they were false.

The truth is that the safest procedure, for my life and my future fertility, would have been a D&E, dilation and evacuation, what the ignorant authoritarian fundamentalist assholes who killed Dr. Tiller call "partial birth abortion".

Now, if I had been given all the information and allowed to make an informed choice, I probably would have chosen something similar to what I actually endured, because I hate hate hate being interfered with. Nevertheless, I am furious that some ignorant authoritarian fundamentalist asshole decided that I did not need to be informed or to consent, because he knew what was best.

And all you ignorant authoritarian fundamentalist assholes who want to base the law of the land on your fantasy of lazy crazy sluts who can't be bothered to have a baby and can't be bothered to get an abortion before the third trimester: the terrorism you endorse has no effect on your fantasy sluts, but it has real, life-altering, permanent effects on people like me.

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[wild_irises]

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