The Burden of Knowing

Kristen Lavin Daly
Jul 20, 2017 · 8 min read

Some Truth About Choice in the Age of Misinformation

Anna Noreen Walsh McCaffrey, the author’s Grandmother, circa 1942.

November 6th, 2016 — early morning.

Like you, I find myself immersed in the upcoming election. It pervades most of my conversations, my social media feed, and my thoughts. I have chosen to share some of the latter here, with you.

Whether you decide to consult them is secondary; I simply needed to write them down. Perhaps they will help you. I hope they will help us both.

I am not a politician. I do not pretend to have a sound understanding of the crises our country and others face throughout the world, nor the internal or international affairs of our government.

I am an ultrasound technologist. I am a woman.

In my line of work, you see terrible things every day. You find cancer. People lose their babies. Every day. You see good things, too- or, the absence of terrible things. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

I work at an excellent hospital on Long Island, New York, with a renowned High Risk OB/GYN department. I don’t often scan patients who are past their first trimester. I’m not an OB tech. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I could be.

I work mostly with patients coming into the emergency room, many of whom are in the early stages of pregnancy and are experiencing a crisis; they’re bleeding, or they’re in pain. They’re scared. Sometimes it’s okay; light bleeding can be normal during this time, and the pregnancy looks healthy. Sometimes it’s not okay.

For those women, the doctor and I have a lot of questions to answer. What’s going to happen to their baby? What’s going to happen to them?

Well, a few things could happen. It is biology’s design that your body take care of itself; we were intended to live, to thrive, to survive. Contractions begin, and your uterus expels those materials that had formed within, in the hopes of being born. You bleed, heavily. Tissue passes. I have heard it described as the worst menstrual cramps of your life.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, that doesn’t entirely happen — after all, you weren’t supposed to give birth for another six or seven months. In this case, patients often have to undergo a “D and C,” where the uterine material is surgically removed. Sometimes products of conception are retained and become painfully infected, and the patient must undergo surgery a second time.

Sometimes those same patients who were okay come back a few weeks later, and you have a different answer for them today, and now they, too, ask you those same questions.

We all know someone who has suffered a miscarriage. If you think you don’t, try having some intimate conversations with the women and men in your life. You will see just how unaware you were.

As sad as it is, of the women who will lose their pregnancies, those early ones — the ones I see — are the lucky ones.

Sometimes everything seems to be going well, but there’s a serious problem that can’t be diagnosed until later in the pregnancy, after five or more months — a fetal anomaly, for instance.

Sometimes these anomalies aren’t discovered before the baby is born.

In 2013, the leading cause of infant death in the U.S. was fetal anomalies, accounting for 20% of all infant deaths.

That’s 4,778 babies.

Think about that.

Think about their mothers.

Sometimes those anomalies are discovered, though. Sometimes you can see, on an ultrasound in a hospital like mine, that the baby growing inside you does not have a brain, or that they won’t be able to swallow, or breathe; that they will be born only to feel real human pain, the pain of dying, for minutes — or months — before it ends.

Seeing the serious problem beforehand is both blessing and curse. You are robbed of those dreams and joys of motherhood, of course; of the life you envisioned for yourself, and for your baby — but you are able to spare them the anguish of a living death. You are able to spare them their pain. As mothers, this is what we strive to provide for our children, both in their lives and in their deaths.

This is what is known as a “late term abortion.”

It is never because someone no longer wants to have a baby. It is never, ever easy. It is always unbelievably heartbreaking.

In 2013, approximately 7,303 American women had late term abortions due to fetal anomalies. If that amount remains consistent over the next three years — and it most likely will — that would mean roughly just under 30,000 late term abortions will take place over the course of a four year presidential term.

I live in New York state, which is about as blue as states get. In New York, abortion is legal until the 24th week of pregnancy. The problem with this is that many fetal anomalies — microcephaly and other cerebral defects associated with the Zika virus, for instance — may not present on ultrasound until the late second or even third trimester. At the point of diagnosis, we will most likely have passed the 24th week.

Another young woman from New York recently gave an astounding interview in which she described the lengths she had to go to in order to undergo a late term abortion, after learning at 31 weeks pregnant that the baby she carried would be born incompatible with life.

She flew to Colorado, one of only nine states without laws restricting abortion, where she would be able to receive an injection that could stop the heartbeat of her unborn child. The cost for this injection is ten thousand dollars cash, which will most likely not be covered by her insurance. The cost is so high because of the unbelievably expensive insurance the clinic there is forced to carry, due to the constant risk of physical damage to the building and employees by violent religious extremists. It was incredibly enlightening, even to someone who works in the field, and should be required reading for anyone voicing their opinion on the subject of late term abortion.

Her account is harrowing and courageous and heartbreaking. Remember: her account is one of 7,303 — per year.

If you have made it this far, you care about women’s health. You care about women’s rights. You care about the gravity of the difficult choices we are forced to make as women, as mothers.

I am not a politician, as I said, and I don’t pretend to be.

I know my profession, and my gender, and all that entails.

I know that my grandmother never missed an election, local or otherwise, because her mother was born before women were “given” the right to vote, by men. She and my mother would take me with them into the voting booth on election day when I was a child, so I would know the awesome power and responsibility granted to me as an American citizen. They’d let me pull the lever, and our vote would be recorded, and the curtains would fly open and the light would shine in, and I felt the pride of a daughter of liberty.

As election day approaches, it becomes clearer and clearer that there is only one candidate who shares our passion for the rights of women, reproductive and otherwise; who understands that politicians have no place dictating the appropriate medical treatment for a woman’s reproductive health. That person is Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Let me be clear: I am not voting for her because she is a woman. I am voting for her because she is a champion for women.

This is America. Religion, and the ego thereby associated — and that is ultimately what it comes down to, every time, with those who oppose late term abortions — has no place in our government, our legislation, or in our medical treatment; there is only room for compassion, and for mercy.

In 2016, in a country founded on the principle of religious freedom, this should be well understood by now. Of course if that were the case I wouldn’t be so compelled to share this, for fear that you might not know how important it all is.

With the overexposure and under-informing of Americans by the media cycle corresponding to this election, many people have established deep resentments against candidates based on completely misrepresented events — events so bogged down with partisan double-speak that they’re difficult to follow even when you work in government.

It is in this manner of mass media misinformation that “late term abortions” becomes “ripping the baby from the womb.” And many American’s will accept this, will not take it upon themselves to learn the truth, because they saw it on FOX News, and for some reason that’s good enough for them.

It astonishes me when I hear women say they are voting for Donald Trump, a man who said in the last presidential debate that he intends to appoint judges to the Supreme Court who would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, the single greatest judicial victory in the history of women’s rights since the right to vote. I do not want to believe a single one of us would betray her gender in such a way as to give her voice to this man, who stated that women who have abortions “should receive some sort of punishment,” and to his running mate, who, in addition to passing extensive legislature banning abortion, also opposes same sex marriage, federal funding for those suffering from HIV/AIDS, and even the theory of evolution — in the year 2016.

It is nearly six in the morning, but still I can not sleep, because I have to tell you this, and we have to tell the world, together:

A vote for Donald Trump is a vote against your daughter, your sister, yourself.

Let us never forget that it is less than one hundred years since American women have had a voice in the laws that govern us.

Let us never forget the hundreds of years of silence that preceded them, the innumerable labors and sacrifices of our mothers, our grandmothers and great grandmothers, and all the women who came before.

We have come too far to turn back now. For the sake of our children and the world we hope to leave for them, we can not, and we shall not. Not now, not ever.

November 8th I will walk into my polling place — my old junior high, as it happens — to vote. My mother will be with me. I will think of my grandmother, gone almost twelve years now, as I cast my ballot for the first woman president in our nation’s history. I will weep, overcome with pride and gratitude for our gender, and I will feel the light shine as the curtains fly open- even though the curtains, too, are long gone.

I can’t wait to tell my daughter about it someday.

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Kristen Lavin Daly

Written by

Storyteller, sonographer, musician, and raccoon enthusiast.

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