The Late-Term Abortion I Didn't Want

[question everything]

By Molly Jong-Fast

A federal judge last week struck down a Mississippi law banning abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Even supporters of abortion rights may wonder why a woman would need an abortion so late.

I was 24 when I accidentally got pregnant... My doctor, serious but chipper, had a very worried look on her face as my husband and I sat in her Fifth Avenue office. She told us: “You both carry a Jewish genetic disease called Canavan’s.” “OK,” my husband said, as I tried to digest the news. The doctor went on: “Canavan’s is fatal. Canavan’s babies don’t live past 5 years old. Since you and your husband are carriers of Canavan’s, you have a 1 in 4 chance of having an affected fetus. You cannot carry an affected fetus to term. The fatality rate for Canavan’s disease is 100%.”

By this point, I was crying. “You’ll go and have a chorionic villus sampling,” she explained. The technology has since improved, but back then you could only have that test between 10 and 12 weeks. “And when the results come back you’ll be in your second trimester.” She paused, then said something that felt like a rebuke: “Unfortunately, I’m not trained to do second-trimester abortions, so you’d have to find someone else.”

(snip)

For the next 10 days I thought about the idea of getting rid of a baby I had grown to want desperately. A Canavan’s baby would have seizures, its brain would deteriorate, it would become paralyzed and blind, and eventually it—he—would die. He would spend years in agonizing decay, and we’d have to watch every day of it... We arrived at the genetic counselor’s office to learn our results. It turned out we won the lottery. My baby was not affected, not even a carrier.

He was born the following January, a strapping 9 pounds, 5 ounces. He is now 14, a freshman in high school. Having him was the greatest decision I ever made, but being forced to carry a terminally ill baby would have been the greatest tragedy of my life. That is why I am committed to keeping second-trimester abortions safe and legal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-late-term-abortion-i-didnt-want-1543276878 (paid subscription)