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 Life, Death and PoliticsPosted on Apr 24, 2007By Marie Cocco WASHINGTON—The bleeding began just after Donna McNichol’s routine exam in the early weeks of her first pregnancy. “They told me I might spot a little bit after the exam,” she recalled in an interview. “But I wasn’t spotting. I was flowing.” The pregnancy was planned and joyful. The young California health aide and her teacher husband had just announced it to their families with a celebratory video of themselves playing “Wheel of Fortune.” “I was really blessed,” McNichol, now 49, says. Her bleeding continued even when she rested in bed. Then the nausea started. “They kept saying that was a good sign, but it wasn’t,” McNichol says. “Sometimes I would pass big blood clots—even the size of my fist.” Neither her own doctors nor colleagues at the Planned Parenthood clinic where McNichol was working could diagnose what was wrong. She underwent test after test. No well-known aberration that can ruin a pregnancy was completely ruled out—or in. As the blood loss continued, McNichol took a reading of her iron count and discovered it was dangerously low. Fatigue sapped her. “I was just getting sicker because I was losing so much blood,” she says. New worries arose. She wanted badly to continue the pregnancy, but it was clear that she’d eventually need blood transfusions—and acquired immune deficiency syndrome was just emerging as a little-understood menace in the San Francisco Bay area, where McNichol lives. “The blood supply wasn’t screened,” she recalls. Though her health and her concern about it worsened by the day, she still hoped to continue the pregnancy. But eventually, she began asking her closest relatives and friends what to do. “The worst part of it was that it was never clear,” McNichol says. “I never knew what was the right thing to do.” At 20 weeks, McNichol had an abortion using a procedure she says fit the description of the intact extraction method that the U.S. Supreme Court banned last week. Afterward, she learned her condition was placental abruption—the placenta, which nourishes the fetus, was breaking up and sloughing off from her uterus. The condition can cause a woman to bleed to death. “It’s one of the causes of maternal death,” McNichol says. McNichol went on to have two healthy pregnancies. Her children are now teenagers. She first told her story in a friend-of-court brief submitted to the lower courts as the landmark abortion case wound its way upward. It seems that neither she nor her doctors are callous baby killers who will use any and all means to destroy a fetus they’ve decided to cavalierly discard. And nothing about McNichol’s case supports Justice Anthony Kennedy’s conclusion that Congress is correct to ban an abortion method because “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. ... Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.” Yet Kennedy wrote that he found “no reliable data” to support this conclusion. McNichol told me that once she learned that her life had been at risk, the moral qualms that weighed so heavily upon her before choosing to terminate the pregnancy lifted. The anti-abortion movement has fooled the country into believing that all the Supreme Court did last week was ban a particularly odious and medically unwarranted method of abortion. That is the least of it. The court emphatically said that Congress—not doctors or patients—can decide what’s best for women’s health. The high court ruled that when there is “medical uncertainty,” lawmakers can decide what course of treatment is, or isn’t, legal. We are all Terri Schiavo now. We all can be subject to second-guessing of our family’s medical choices from the halls of Congress. McNichol’s doctors couldn’t diagnose what was wrong. How could the justices? How could 535 members of the House and Senate—448 of them men—prescribe the best medicine for a woman they’ve never met, let alone examined with a trained eye? “I have to tell you, I asked everyone—what should I do?” McNichol says. “I never thought about calling up my representative in Congress to ask them what to do. There was no way that someone who has any other agenda but my well-being could make that decision. It wasn’t a political decision. It was a medical, personal decision.” It is the sort of decision American women no longer can assume they are free to make. Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at symbol)washpost.com. (c) 2007, Washington Post Writers Group Previous item: Jesus 'Love-Bombs' You Next item: 'American Idol' Tackles Poverty Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig.
By Elizabeth Barger, April 25, 2007 at 10:43 am # Our friends and sisters and daughters are in mortal peril because of this misogynist decision by this unbalanced court. The death and impairment of living women stains the hands of all who agree with the ban.Congress needs to pass a law striking down the ban and insisting that women’s health is important.
By Daniel Miller, April 24, 2007 at 1:34 pm # So, you have found one example where a mother’s life was saved by performing a partial birth abortion, congrats! But what about the mega-number of these procedures where the “doctor” had to push the child back into the woman’s womb so that he/she could kill the child legally, who’s life was saved the many times that happened? What about the children that were totally viable but were inconvenient to the mother, not a real threat physically, but perhaps to her lifestyle. Did these children deserve to die just because the mother didn’t want them??
By M Currey, April 24, 2007 at 8:09 am # Of course the Bush Adminstration loves power, when Laura spoke about something, she was shot down by her husband, now she only does what she is told to do. This thing about abortion, I am sure that the God who created us, would look at a women in danger of dying from a pregnancy and would say save the woman there can always be another pregnancy. The Native people of Alaska when the Russians were coming to destroy them, they killed the babies lest the crying would give them away and slow down their escape, their reason is we can always make more babies but we cannot always replace the mothers who are about to be killed. I am against abortion generally but in the reasoning of the Native Americans you can always make babies, but if all the mothers are gone there will be no babies. So abortion to save a woman is preferable to destroying the mother. But do the powers that be see it that way? How could they if they had something life threating I am sure they would do the same. The old line “walk in the shoes of the fisherman” applies here. M Currey
By MARIAM RUSSELL, April 24, 2007 at 7:40 am # Those same male jerks who want control over your medical care also want to limit or deny you good and reliable birth control, but also mandate thru these religions that they, men, husbands, have the ¨right¨ of access to your body. If that is a situation you can live with, go to it. If not, just say no. Opt out. Go to school. Go to the local sex shop and learn to take care of your own needs. Why should you be in danger of a horrible death for the pleasure and convenience of some man, any man who will not even admit your right to your own life? If you act like herd animals, then, you cannot complain when you are bred as herd animals.
By laura cardinal, April 24, 2007 at 6:42 am # Sometimes being old has its advantages. In my lifetime, I fear, I will see the matter of abortion rights come full circle, from the pre-Roe underground abortions, to fully recognized rights, to the whittling away of rights, to a full return to underground abortions. There has always been and there will always be a need for abortions. My grandmother performed abortions. Before Roe, women were guided to an underground network of kind and compassionate, or ruthless and greedy, providers of abortion. The old way was “a way”, but legal, safe abortions is infinitely preferable. These dogs we have on the Supreme Court and who we have in government need to be whipped mercilessly until they learn.
By KISS, April 24, 2007 at 5:43 am # Again, religion doctrine is the driving force behind the decision of the Supreme court. Science once more must bow to ignorance and superstition. While I find abortion is an abominable method of birth control I find that abortion, for many, is not only acceptable but is necessary for the mental health as well as the physical health of woman who for a myriad amount of reasons must not bring the pregnancy to full term. The American people, especially women, must elect a president that will appoint the next justices with convictions based on science and not superstition. This supreme court is so overwhelmed by their religious beliefs that all decisions now must be viewed with skepticism. Add Your Comment |
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Newsroom Carnage Continues at The Washington Post
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