Woman Defends Having Abortion at 8 Months, Ending the Life of Her 32-Week-Old Baby

Opinion   |   Christina Vazquez   |   Aug 15, 2018   |   11:54AM   |   Washington, DC

In a June article for The Cut titled “How I Got This Baby,” a woman detailed her story of giving birth to a child—after having aborted her previous child at 32 weeks of pregnancy.

A woman named Erika shared the ups and downs of trying to have a baby with her husband. The first time she got pregnant, she lost her child in a miscarriage. While the miscarriage rattled Erika, she said she was able to get pregnant the very next month. However, the joy she had with her first pregnancy was replaced by hesitancy.

At 13 weeks, Erika’s ob-gyn informed her that her unborn child had markers for spina bifida. Erika continued on with her pregnancy. Later, she found out that her child was a boy, but as the child grew, the couple encountered more complications, according to the report. Despite this, the little boy was growing so the parents continued on.

It was at 30 weeks – far past the point of viability – that Erika learned her unborn son had stopped growing, and her amniotic fluid was “alarmingly high.” She said her doctors warned that if she carried the child to term, he would most likely choke within minutes of being born. She was given the option to abort her late-term unborn son.

“It’s embarrassing to me now, but we had never considered the idea of terminating a pregnancy we wanted,” Erika wrote. “It’s just not something that, as a culture, we really discuss all that much. In my mind, even being a fiercely pro-choice person, the woman who gets an abortion is someone who doesn’t want to be pregnant. The idea of terminating a wanted pregnancy just wasn’t on my radar.”

However, Erika decided to have the abortion, and at 32 weeks, she flew to Colorado where late-term abortions are legal to have her child injected with a shot that stopped his heart, the report states. The mother said she was then given drugs to prevent her from going into labor on the flight back to New York where she lived. She then went through labor at a New York hospital the next day and delivered her dead son.

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A few months after her abortion, Erika became pregnant again. The child was healthy during the entirety of the pregnancy, and she gave birth at 40 weeks, according to the report.

Erika said she is very happy with her new daughter, but still feels guilt.

“In my mind, I don’t have a dead child. I didn’t lose a child. I lost a very wanted pregnancy. I believe I lost more than a fetus, less than a baby,” Erika wrote.

After the birth of her daughter, Erika and her husband founded a radical pro-abortion organization with a goal to expand legalized abortion in New York to all nine months of pregnancy.

Despite Erika’s experience, many children have been misdiagnosed in the womb and have outlived their doctors’ diagnoses. One such example is of Mylah Perkins, who was diagnosed with Trisomy 18 in the womb. Her mother was encouraged to abort her, but she chose life instead; and Mylah is still alive today.

Doctors are human and have erred in the past. While Erika’s decision may have been difficult for her to make, there is a chance that her son may have survived birth and proved the doctors wrong, but he was denied that opportunity. Giving children a death sentence before they are even born denies them their right to life. Children deserve that chance to live, to prove doctors wrong and defy the odds.

LifeNews Note: Photo shows 32-week-old unborn baby.