May 14, 2015

Dear Politicians,

Please stop. Stop making personal, medical, and parental decisions. Stop spending your valuable time dialing back rights women have had for over 40 years. Please put your privileged, powerful energy elsewhere… toward poverty and inequality and hunger and racism and sexism and the ravages of war. Instead, you in the U.S. House have again passed the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Instead, the people you seem most concerned with criminalizing are heartbroken mothers and the doctors who care for them.

I feel like I’m back in Chile, without choice, speaking out about the very real consequences of these bans. That post was subsequently published in an anthology about abortion. Our story also appeared in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. I am not the only one speaking out about all that can go wrong during pregnancy. And two years later, we are right back where we started, further back in fact.

Then, our rights were being taken away. Now, they are also being subverted and overruled. As Laura Bassett writes in her Huffington Post article, “There is no exception for severe fetal anomalies, and the bill requires a neonatal doctor to try to save the fetus if there is any chance it could survive outside the womb.” As the Associated Press wrote, “Newly added to the bill is a requirement that the mother sign a consent form acknowledging that an attempt will be made to let her fetus be born alive unless the mother’s health would be threatened.”

Guess what, Congress, that isn’t consent.

As the Huffington Post article also states, “Abortions after 20 weeks are extremely rare, accounting for only about 1 percent of all abortions. Opponents of the legislation worry that it will hurt women [like Williams] who discover severe medical problems late into their pregnancies.”

Women like me. Babies like Lorenzo.

With this bill, you have made life infinitely harder for that 1 percent of us who choose to protect our children from needless suffering, who choose to protect our own souls, as much as is possible, from forcing that suffering, and who choose to take on that suffering instead. We already have precious little time to consider horrible options (but options all the same). We are already devastated over our children’s prognosis, already heartbroken. Now, you are forcing us to deliver severely compromised children.

Also absent from the bill is any truthful, medical examination of what that kind of survival might look like—the painful interventions required, the long-term effects, and at whose emotional, physical, and financial cost?

YOU are the ones forcing our severely compromised children to endure pain.

I have a friend whose baby was born at 24 weeks, 1 day. She was in pre-term labor with nothing more to be done to stop it. Ultimately, she came to the same conclusion for her son as Ryan and I did for Lorenzo—that “the medical interventions that might sustain their lives were too aggressive, too dangerous, and too painful for their little bodies,” as she so aptly put it. “But because you made the decision 17 hours before he left the womb, and I made the decision 17 hours after, I have the parental choice to withdraw treatment, and you are forced to watch your child suffer?”

Given this law, the answer would be yes. There, again, the consequence.

For my friend and me, our fates landed us in the same place… with dead first children. Neither one of us wanted that. But neither one of us wanted to force our children to endure medically what we as their parents—and as adults acting within the confines of the law—deemed to be too much.

The medical science she and I were presented with in our darkest hours has not changed. But laws are. That is a terrifying equation. And that is why this is a ruse. This is not actually about pain at all. This is about stripping away women’s constitutional rights. This is an incremental step toward the complete abolition of abortion. That is the end game here.

As Hillary Clinton said in response to the ban’s passing, “The bill puts women’s health and rights at risk, undermines the role doctors play in health care decisions, burdens survivors of sexual assault, and is not based on sound science. It also follows a dangerous trend we are witnessing across the country. In just the first three months of 2015, more than 300 bills have been introduced in state legislatures — on top of the nearly 30 measures introduced in Congress — that restricted access to abortion.”

We, the people you serve, must speak up and demand that your largely white, male, political elite STOP making decisions for mothers and their physical and emotional health and that of their unborn children. For now, your message has been received: In 2015, women’s constitutional rights and choices don’t matter. That is what decisions like yours yesterday affirm. And that is not okay.

Sincerely,

A heartbroken mother who is FIRED UP. And you don’t mess with those.