It took Mary Vargas six months and repeated hormone shots to get pregnant with her second child.
“We wanted this baby with every fiber of our beings.”
The technician revealed they were having another son.
But partway through the exam, she fell silent.
Concerned and scared, Vargas’s husband turned off the camera.
The mother makes amniotic fluid until midway through the second trimester; afterward, it mostly comprises fetal urine.
Only time and more tests would give the couple absolute answers.
“Our doctor took great pains to be reassuring,” recalls Vargas, a disability-rights attorney in Maryland.
“We wanted that little boy under any terms,” she remembers tearfully.
But she didn’t want him to suffer.
She knew that if he had Potter’s syndrome, those were terms she could not live with.
“The doctor had his arms folded and just stared at the pictures,” Vargas says.
“He was lost for words.”
What everyone saw above them that day was gruesome and heartbreaking.
Not only were his kidneys not functioning, but this had also prevented his lungs from developing.
And that death would likely be very painful for him.
“He had no chance at life.
What we had to think about was how he was going to die.
It wasn’t about choice, because the option we wantedto have our babywas no longer available.”
Thankfully, few women have to take this step.
“I have never met a woman who didn’t agonize over this decision.”
These tragedies are now at the center of the abortion debate.
In April 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act.
D&X has always been a rare procedure, and there are other options for ending advanced pregnancies.
Eleven more states have introduced similar bills this year.
“Soon they may stop doing them entirely because of who is looking over their shoulder.”
For more than two weeks the Vargases had anguished while they waited for a definitive diagnosis.
At first they considered an induction and delivery, which would give the Vargases a chance to hold him.
“But that didn’t seem like it was best for him,” Vargas says.
A counselor in Vargas’s perinatologist’s practice located a doctor, but that was only the first hurdle.
Vargas’s doctor first inserted seaweed sticks known as laminaria into her cervix to prompt it to dilate.
The next day, she took misoprostol, a medication that encourages the cervix to dilate even more.
Later, the doctor ended her pregnancy.
The Vargases, like other families, were intent on minimizing their son’s suffering.
But the question of how to do that has also become medically and politically controversial.
Nevertheless, they worry that in an emergency, it would no longer be available to them.
In this new, threatening climate, doctors don’t want to leave any opening for prosecutors.
And we make patients get them not to benefit them, but to protect ourselves from going to jail.
I’m forced to choose my well-being over that of my patients."
Until that point, she says, “mine was a regular, healthy pregnancy.”
She was told her baby would die inside of her or immediately after he was born.
“Now I was carrying a pregnancy that was a deathwatch.”
She asked her obstetricians when she could terminate.
The head of the practice replied, “We call that murder.”
The idea of holding a baby as its organs failedwe couldn’t think of anything worse."
But Dr. Tiller’s troubles are not over.
Morrison has since been replaced himself after confessing to cheating on his wife with a staffer.
But the charges are still pending, says Lee Thompson, Dr. Tiller’s attorney.
To Audrey and her husband, the controversial Dr. Tiller and his staff became a godsend.
Within a few days of getting the doctor’s name, they flew to Kansas.
“They were amazing to us.
She also turned to a local rabbi for spiritual counseling.
Although she didn’t expect to want to, Audrey held his lifeless body after he was born.
“I was worried he would be grotesque and that he wasn’t made it harder.
But I knew he wasn’t OK inside.”
“I live with this decision every day,” she says.
“But I have never regretted it.”
The facility doesn’t provide primary medical care; deliveries or inductions are done at local hospitals.
“We take a stab at comfort women and facilitate greater closeness to their child.”
Kim Ortmeier, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom, first learned about perinatal hospice from her obstetrician.
“Abortion was never a consideration,” says Ortmeier, a devout Catholic.
When her obstetrician recommended they contact Choices, Ortmeier hesitated.
“Because the services were free I wondered if they were quality,” she says.
But she decided to check it out anyway.
She started working with the center in her 28th week of pregnancy, when delivery seemed imminent.
“They offered me constant support in an environment that was very pro-life,” she says.
“Perinatal hospice gives women an alternative that is a better choice than abortion.”
“We kept her until the nurses said they had to take her,” Ortmeier says.
“It was a very hard pregnancy,” Ortmeier says.
“But holding my baby was the biggest reward I could ever have had.
I would do it again, although I pray I don’t have to.”
Ortmeier is convinced that hospice was the best option for her family.
The kicks and rolls Ortmeier enjoyed during her doomed pregnancy were, for Audrey, an absolute nightmare.
Ortmeier welcomed strangers' interest in her growing belly, whereas Audrey shrank from it.
But I would hate to have the situation where women had no choice but to do that.”
Photo Credit: Carlos Aponte
