Jun 27
In Texas, Miscarriage Moms Are Going To Die
The overturning of Roe v. Wade will take the lives of mothers who aren’t choosing to abort their babies.
On April 16th, 2015, I went into my doctor’s office for my 12-week ultrasound and checkup. I was 12 weeks along with my second child. I had a 2-year-old little boy at home. At the ultrasound, I found out there was no heartbeat. Apparently, the baby had stopped growing at 10 weeks, so the baby had actually died about two weeks prior. My body didn’t actually miscarry the baby, this is something called a “missed miscarriage.” It’s all quite sad to think about — a mother’s body not letting a fetus go.
I was given three options:
- To go back home and let the baby pass on its own. This was not a great option, as I’d already held onto it for two weeks.
- To take pills that would help initiate labor and hopefully pass the baby and the entire contents of my uterus at home.
- To come back the next day for a procedure known as a Dilation and Curettage (D and C) to surgically remove the baby and any other tissue in my uterus.
I chose the last one.
I’m not going to go into the excruciating details or the aftermath of not only finding out my baby died and then having her surgically removed from my body, but I will tell you that it was the most heartbreaking thing I’ve ever lived through. It completely and irrevocably changed the person I was and am today.
My point is, here we are seven years later, and other mothers in my shoes, living in other parts of the country, might die because they will be forced to keep their dead babies inside of them due to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.
Time Magazine explains this best: “Medical interventions offered for missed or incomplete miscarriage — miscarriages where the body has not registered the pregnancy loss or has not fully expelled the tissue — involve the same medications and procedures used for abortion. The only difference is whether the fetal heart has stopped first. Physicians frequently offer these patients medication to start or intensify contractions to speed up the miscarriage process. Many patients prefer this to waiting, as it can take weeks or months for the body to do this on its own.”
The choices that will be offered to missed miscarriage moms in states where abortion is soon to be illegal are going to be minimal. Pharmacists are already skeptical to give out the pills that can induce a miscarriage out of fear of being prosecuted should the pills not be used properly (Time).
There is a grey area with mothers that have suffered missed miscarriages. Since the surgical intervention that would remove the fetus from her body is technically an “abortion,” this makes the law tricky.
The other side says it’s nothing to worry about: “John Seago, legislative director for Texas Right to Life, described this type of hesitation as “an awful misunderstanding of the law.” Even before the passage of the two bills, existing Texas law stated that the act is not an abortion if it involves the treatment of an ectopic pregnancy — which most commonly occurs when the pregnancy grows in the fallopian tube — or to “remove a dead, unborn child whose death was caused by spontaneous abortion,” he said, pointing to the statute. Another area of Texas law that Seago cited provides an exception to the state’s abortion restrictions if the mother’s life is in danger or she’s at “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” unless an abortion is performed.
“It is a pro-life position to allow physicians to make those life-and-death decisions,” Seago said. “And that may mean in certain circumstances protecting the mother in this situation and the child passing away.” (NPR)
While all of this may be true, the wording of the Texas law has left some doctors confused and somewhat scared as to how to proceed. To be fair, I don’t blame them! I wouldn’t want to break the law, lose my medical license and go to prison for doing the wrong thing here.
So…now what?
Texas is not the only state in which these grey areas are showing up. In many cases, missed miscarriages require surgical intervention. The mere fact that a woman’s body has not expelled the dead fetus and the remaining contents of a broken pregnancy is enough to get a D&C. That’s why I chose to have one. I didn’t want to go home with pills and only pass some of the tissue that needed to exit my body. I likely still would have needed to go back in and have it surgically extracted regardless.
I also did not want to deal with the trauma of having my dead baby born on my bathroom floor. Finding out your baby died is hard enough, but to have the ways in which you have to deliver your dead baby limited and called into question is pure insanity! If anything is left in the uterus, the mother can face sepsis and even death.
As a woman that has suffered this awful trauma, my heart goes out to all of the women that will now face judgment for getting an abortion to remove the dead tissue from their bodies. There will be many more steps involved and unanswered questions that nobody seems to have the answers for.
© Britt LeBoeuf, 2022. All rights reserved.
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