Nothing prepares you for the moment when the ultrasound technician’s face goes blank. One minute, he’s chattering happily, and the next he is silent, staring intently at the screen. You don’t know what he sees, but it’s clear it isn’t good. This isn’t a “Congratulations! You’re having twins!” face.
You plead for information. He demurs. “I just do the ultrasound. The doctor will come in to interpret the results.” You want him to smile, to breathe a sigh of relief, to crack a joke. He doesn’t. He checks the screen one last time before leaving the room.
You lay on the cot in the dim light. Your shirt is still up, and your exposed abdomen is cold from the gel the technician slathered on. Your heart races. There can’t be anything wrong, you tell yourself. You feel fine. You’ve had no morning sickness. You took prenatal vitamins even before you were pregnant. You drink water, eat vegetables, avoid tuna fish because it’s high in mercury. You exercise. How could anything be wrong?
The doctor comes in. Silently, she runs the wand over your belly again. You forget to breathe until someone reminds you to exhale. After several long moments, she places a gentle hand on your shoulder, and you know. Tears run down your cheeks before she says a word.
“We can’t find a heartbeat.”
You beg her to take another look. She shows you the screen, where the tiny bean-shaped creature inside of you is still. There is no flutter indicating a heartbeat. On your chart, the doctor types “fetal demise.”
You are given options. Would you prefer to let nature take its course, and wait for your body to expel the remains in a few weeks, or would you prefer to schedule a procedure to remove all traces of what you had hoped would be new life? You don’t want to wait. The uncertainty, the risk of infection, the grief of being both pregnant and not expecting all weigh on you. You want this over as soon as possible.
At the same time, you fear making an error. If you just wait a little longer, stare a little harder at the screen, will the heartbeat become visible? You implore the doctor to assure you there is no sign of life, no chance of making an error.
Two days later, in a cold, sterile hospital room, you awake, sedated, sore, and sad.
Doubt creeps in. Perhaps this is somehow your fault. Before you knew you were pregnant, you drank a glass of wine, or maybe two. You exercised vigorously. You went horseback riding, took cold medicine, sat for too long in a hot bathtub with a good book. You argued loudly with your partner, causing a spike in your blood pressure.
Were your careless actions the cause of those ugly words on your chart, “fetal demise”? You don’t voice your fears to anyone, and no one asks. Fortunately, you are met with sympathy, rather than accusation. The doctor reassures you that it was a fetus that most likely wasn’t viable and wouldn’t have developed. Still, you sit quietly with your guilt-tinged grief.
Could you have done something differently?
Statistics from the Mayo clinic show that 10 to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. In reality the actual number is likely higher, due to the number of women who miscarry before realizing they are pregnant. Most often, the causes for miscarriage are unknown.
As states such as Georgia, Ohio, and Alabama strive to impose greater restrictions on elective abortion, the risk of miscarriage being caught up in the net of prosecution looms.
In Georgia, HB481—the Living Infants Fairness and Equality Act— set to take effect in January 2020, gives a fetus the status of personhood at six weeks, banning abortion after that time. The new law ominously hints at the possibility of women being prosecuted for conduct leading to a miscarriage. Ostensibly this is meant to address women who use drugs or alcohol during pregnancy, or seek out legal abortifacients, all able to be prosecuted as second-degree murder and punishable by 10 to 30 years in prison. However, it is easy to imagine a future in which medical personnel who are mandated reporters find themselves turning grieving mothers over to overzealous prosecutors.
As politicians leap over one another in their enthusiasm to outdo one another in pro-birth fervor, they run the risk of tremendous unintended consequences. Will Georgia and like-minded states cast a suspicious eye on bereft mothers who then find themselves dealing with not only loss but prosecution?
It behooves all of us to hope that cooler heads prevail or that such laws will be challenged in court. Perhaps one day we will live to see policies formulated that take into account the value of all lives involved.
