MS Magazine had a essay competition in 2004, one of the finalists article’s captured what I’m about to write about amazingly well. She’s a Pulitzer Prize winner, so her article is much, much more eloquent than I could ever be.
On Friday afternoon I came home to explain to my husband that the heart of our future baby had stopped beating.
My doctor immediately recommended two high quality doctors to see. Neither doctor took my insurance. I looked online for doctors and couldn’t find anything. I looked up doctors on Aetna’s website and began calling doctors trying to find someone in network. I couldn’t understand why I was having such a hard time finding somewhere to do the procedure that I desperately needed. My husband was completely confused as to why I couldn’t find a doctor. I lay in bed all day wondering, when will I begin bleeding, when will I begin to lose this baby.
Aetna was extremely unhelpful in directing me to a doctor (told me to go online and search for one). A helpful call to UCLA informed me that if I called in and explained that I couldn’t find a doctor to do the medically necessary procedure, my insurance could approve a non approved facility. This as I learned was rather common. So today has been spent on the phone with Aetna, my referring physician, Precertification, and Member Services. I’m in, but I still don’t know how much money it will all cost, so I get to wake up at 5am PT to call so that I can ensure I am not saddled with a $3,000 bill, despite having insurance.
So why has this been such a large ordeal? Why couldn’t I just go in and get everything taken care of? Because a D&E is an abortion procedure. Anyone who’s had a first trimester miscarriage is familiar with the terms D&C, and most doctors perform this procedure. However, as the article I mentioned earlier points out:
On November 6, 2003, President Bush signed what he called a “partial birth abortion ban,” prohibiting doctors from committing an “overt act” designed to kill a partially delivered fetus. The law, which faces vigorous challenges, is the most significant change to the nation’s abortion laws since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled abortion legal in Roe v. Wade in 1973. One of the unintended consequences of this new law is that it put people in my position, with a fetus that is already dead, in a technical limbo.
Legally, a doctor can still surgically take a dead body out of a pregnant woman. But in reality, the years of angry debate that led to the law’s passage, restrictive state laws and the violence targeting physicians have reduced the number of hospitals and doctors willing to do dilations and evacuations (D&Es) and dilations and extractions (intact D&Es), which involve removing a larger fetus, sometimes in pieces, from the womb.
At the same time, fewer medical schools are training doctors to do these procedures. After all, why spend time training for a surgery that’s likely to be made illegal?
At this point, 74 percent of obstetrics and gynecology residency programs do not train all residents in abortion procedures, according to reproductive health researchers at the National Abortion Federation. . . .
Fewer than 7 percent of obstetricians are trained to do D&Es, the procedure used on fetuses from about 13 to 19 weeks. Almost all the doctors doing them are over 50 years old.
It is so frustrating to me. On one hand, I am ferverently against abortions for convenience. But on the other hand, the narrow-sighted view on abortion saddens me.
The message I hope to relay to everyone, is no one knows where someone else is coming from. No one can know if a woman going into a clinic is going because she may die if the pregnancy continues, because she was the unfortunate victim of rape or insest, because she is carrying a set of twins and one has died, or because like me her baby is already dead. Each of these poor women is already struggling with her own personal sadness and emotional grief, and to be besieged by the images, hate and fear that are so often associated with abortion clinic angers me.
For those of you are completely anti-abortion, I do concede, that yes I do not have to have a D&E. I could wait until I miscarried, till I began to have contractions and have the experience of actually delivering the fetus.
I also did some research, spoke with friends who were obstetricians and gynecologists, and quickly learned this: Study after study shows D&Es are safer than labor and delivery. Women who had D&Es were far less likely to have bleeding requiring transfusion, infection requiring intravenous antibiotics, organ injuries requiring additional surgery or cervical laceration requiring repair and hospital readmission.
A review of 300 second- trimester abortions published in 2002 in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology found that 29 percent of women who went through labor and delivery had complications, compared with just 4 percent of those who had D&Es.
So that is my story. It was long, without pictures, and not exactly peppy. But it felt good to get it out there, and I really hope this is helpful to someone.
