the incredible shrinking woman

Reading the comments from wingnuts on the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, you’d think that he was mowing down healthy infants in their hospital nursery bassinets with an AK-47.

Nowhere in those comments is there any mention of the mothers who desperately wanted their babies, but who were forced into Dr. Tiller’s care by genetic or gestational defects that defeat even modern medicine’s ability to cure.

Take, for instance, the heartbreaking experience of commenter deekaa6 at Balloon Juice, on his experiences with Dr. Tiller:

In 1994 my wife and I found out that she was pregnant. The pregnancy was difficult and unusually uncomfortable but her doctor repeatedly told her things were fine. Sometime early in the 8th month my wife, an RN who at the time was working in an infertility clinic asked the Dr. she was working for what he thought of her discomfort. He examined her and said that he couldn’t be certain but thought that she might be having twins. We were thrilled and couldn’t wait to get a new sonogram that hopefully would confirm his thoughts. Two days later our joy was turned to unspeakable sadness when the new sonogram showed conjoined twins. Conjoined twins alone is not what was so difficult but the way they were joined meant that at best only one child would survive the surgery to separate them and the survivor would more than likely live a brief and painful life filled with surgery and organ transplants. We were advised that our options were to deliver into the world a child who’s life would be filled with horrible pain and suffering or fly out to Wichita Kansas and to terminate the pregnancy under the direction of Dr. George Tiller.

We made an informed decision to go to Kansas. One can only imagine the pain borne by a woman who happily carries a child for 8 months only to find out near the end of term that the children were not to be and that she had to make the decision to terminate the pregnancy and go against everything she had been taught to believe was right. This was what my wife had to do. Dr. Tiller is a true American hero. The nightmare of our decision and the aftermath was only made bearable by the warmth and compassion of Dr. Tiller and his remarkable staff. Dr. Tiller understood that this decision was the most difficult thing that a woman could ever decide and he took the time to educate us and guide us along with the other two couples who at the time were being forced to make the same decision after discovering that they too were carrying children impacted by horrible fetal anomalies. I could describe in great detail the procedures and the pain and suffering that everyone is subjected to in these situations. However, that is not the point of the post. We can all imagine that this is not something that we would wish on anyone. The point is that the pain and suffering were only mitigated by the compassion and competence of Dr. George Tiller and his staff. We are all diminished today for a host of reasons but most of all because a man of great compassion and courage has been lost to the world.

There was a time, not so many years ago, when I wondered what conditions could possibly exist that would warrant a late term abortion. Couldn’t you detect chromosomal problems by 14 weeks or so? And if the problem was with the mother, why not try for a premature delivery?

That was before my best friend died in childbirth, from a condition undetected until the day her daughter was delivered. Placenta percreta has no cure but late term abortion. It develops in mid-pregnancy, and often the symptoms do not arise until the 20th week of gestation. There is only one alternative to abortion: awaiting viability (24-26 weeks) to do a premature c-section followed by an immediate hysterectomy. But the risks of this alternative are horrendous: rates of maternal and fetal death are enormously high, and blood loss in this type of procedure is greater than major organ transplant surgery.

Even if the woman survives this alternative, she will be unable to have another chance at biological motherhood. But this is the price abortion opponents want her to pay for her “choice.”

Justice Kennedy of the Supreme Court showed similar lack of concern for the health of the mother, and her ability to perhaps have another chance at motherhood, in his opinion in 2007′s Gonzales v. Carhart:

Considerations of marginal safety, including the balance of risks, are within the legislative competence when the regulation is rational and in pursuit of legitimate ends… [I]f some procedures have different risks than others, it does not follow that the State is altogether barred from imposing reasonable regulations. The Act is not invalid on its face where there is uncertainty over whether the barred procedure is ever necessary to preserve a woman’s health, given the availability of other abortion procedures that are considered to be safe alternatives.

So, it’s okay to legislate away a woman’s health so long as there are “alternatives” that will work in most cases. The cases in which alternatives wouldn’t work are just that individual woman’s tough luck.

Eighty-eight percent of abortions are done in the first trimester, well before the fetus is viable; 11+% of abortions are performed sometime in the second trimester, generally as the result of adverse amniocentesis results (the amnio can only be done after the 12th week of pregnancy). Only four one-hundredths of one percent (.04%) are performed in the third trimester or after viability.

For those women, Dr. Tiller was one of only three physicians in the country who were willing to take on the enormous risks associated with their care, who had the compassion, understanding and skill to deal with the most horrific fetal abnormalities, and the most potentially deadly obstetric conditions.

Few doctors are willing to take on the strain of such a practice, even without the menace of violent religious zealots who refuse to even consider the heart-wrenching and life-threatening circumstances that face the patients that must seek such care.

It is likely that Dr. Tiller knew that one day, Scott P. Roeder or some other narcissistic psychopath would take his life. And yet his commitment to his practice, and the women he served, was absolute.

Dr. Tiller also must have known that no matter how many patients came forward to tell their stories of harrowing loss and grief, the right-to-lifers wouldn’t care. Because for them, these women don’t exist as people – they are simply vessels for the god’s perfect fetus. If there are deformities, the vessel was simply not sufficiently worshipful toward the Christian god, and must live with the consequences. After all, Eve was an unrighteous bitch, and so all women are.