In a move that runs counter to the best available science, the United States Constitution, and the wild idea that a woman should be entitled to make her own medical decisions, the House of Representatives has voted to pass a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks nationwide.
The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which Republicans have now tried to pass three times, isn't expected to succeed in the Senate, where Democrats and moderate Republicans can derail it. But its reemergence this week suggests that, despite the evidence, Republicans will continue to push the debunked claim that a fetus can feel pain at 20 weeks and the notion that they're entitled to legislate women's bodies. And this time, the White House is behind them.
In a statement released earlier this week, the Trump administration offered the bill its support and said it "applauds the House of Representatives for continuing its efforts to secure critical pro-life protections."
But Rachel Redmond, who had an abortion at 21 weeks in 2016, would like to know what kind of life—and whose, to be exact—her elected officials favor. Redmond was 19 weeks pregnant when she went in for a routine scan. Just a month earlier, she'd gone in for a genetic screen; the results raised no alarms. In the meantime, she and her husband had moved from New Mexico to Michigan, where her parents lived. Her husband had found a new job. Redmond, who works at home, was eager to settle into a routine before she gave birth. "We were so excited," Redmond, 33, remembers. "It felt like it was all working out."
At first, the visit, which happened to fall on her wedding anniversary, seemed normal, if longer than she'd imagined. In retrospect, it's clearer. The technician kept finding abnormalities; she needed a lot of pictures. But Redmond did find out the gender, a boy, and she and her husband left the appointment in a festive mood. Later, she felt a prickle of nerves. "I called my friend, and I said, 'They took a lot of pictures of the heart,' and she said, 'They did that to me, and everything was fine.'" Redmond hadn't been pregnant before. She didn't know what was normal, she said to herself. She tried to relax.
A few hours later, the doctor called. "She said to us, 'Normally, we look at markers on a scan, and if we see one [issue], we don't worry about it; they tend to resolve themselves. On yours, we found more than one.'" The ultrasound had turned up abnormalities on the fetus's heart, stomach, and brain. Redmond needed to submit to further tests. That was on Monday. By Friday, Redmond knew her son had Dandy-Walker malformation, a condition that affects the development of the cerebellum, which can result in severe coordination, emotional, and neurological problems. The appointment took two hours, but the worst moments came when Redmond saw her son on the ultrasound screen.
"It was excruciating to see [him] and know something's wrong," she says. "The baby's kicking, and I'm still hungry and feeling all the symptoms of being pregnant, except now I get it: Something's really wrong." After the ultrasound, Redmond had an amniocentesis to to test for other chromosomal abnormalities that are sometimes associated with Dandy-Walker malformation. And then she and her husband met with a genetic counselor, who explained the condition and outlined their options, including termination. "We knew from the beginning that this is a variable diagnosis," she says. "Some people live with this syndrome and don't even know it until they have an MRI later in life. Some people have it, and it's more severe; they have seizures, they need to have surgeries."
But then the genetic counselor and the doctor drilled into the specifics. The Redmonds' son was in a negative growth percentile. He would need multiple surgeries soon after he was born. If he survived them, the doctors weren't sure he'd be able to walk or talk or communicate at all. It wasn't clear he'd ever be able to hold himself up. He could have trouble with nutrition, with physical development. "It was a pretty dire picture they painted for us," Redmond says. "It's very surreal. Suddenly, it's like you're not in the real world anymore.... On some level, I knew since the beginning of the week that we had to prepare for the worst. I felt you're going to lose this pregnancy; you have to prepare for it. And I came to believe the best choice I could make was to let the baby go because I didn't think that was any life for a child."
By the end of the appointment, the genetic counselor had explained to the Redmonds that the procedure she would need—a dilation and evacuation—was legal in the State of Michigan up until 24 weeks. In her haze, Redmond remembers that she mentioned the cost, a factor Redmond hadn't even considered. The next week, the results of the amniocentesis showed the Redmonds' son had no chromosomal problems, but doctors suggested an MRI could tell them more about his condition. "It was at that point that I felt like I didn't need any more information." She'd made her decision.
"We were given a referral to one of the few doctors in Detroit who performs the procedure," she says. "He consulted with me on Wednesday, and we scheduled the procedure for Friday morning. On Thursday, I had to drive in to have cervical dilators [inserted]. I was lucky, and it was still a process."
It wasn't until Redmond joined a Facebook group for women who'd been in her position that she realized some women had to travel out of state for their abortions; some had to fly, some had to pay thousands of dollars. "It's hard for me to imagine," she admits. "It's all already so heartbreaking. It's painful enough to call the doctor's office and say, 'I need to schedule a D&E.' It's painful enough to tell perfect strangers the worst thing has happened to you. I can't imagine having to deal with the red tape on top of that."
It's been over a year, and what bothers Redmond most isn't the protestors who demonstrate outside a clinic near her home, urging women who walk in to reconsider. (In fact, four weeks after her procedure, she stopped to meet them: "I said I'd had an abortion at 21 weeks, and it was a baby my husband and I really wanted. He was very sick and would've had a life of suffering, and I basically chose my own suffering over his.") It's that her elected representatives have decided women can't be trusted to make their own choices. "The 20-week cutoff isn't random," she insists. "These complexities, these abnormalities can't be detected before 19, 20 weeks. And so by choosing this date, it's a direct hit on our chance to choose what's best for our children and our families and our own bodies and our own mental health." It's a sinister kind of condescension, and, in the context of GOP-led efforts to slash Medicare and Medicaid, eliminate health care subsidies, and let insurers refuse to cover maternal health, it's evidence that the backers of these bills are more pro-birth than they are pro-human. What happens when these babies go home?
"Women who must carry unwanted pregnancies to term are more likely to live in poverty three years later than women who were able to receive an abortion," Dr. Diana Greene Foster, director of research at Advancing New Standard in Reproductive Health, a research group at the University of California, San Francisco, writes in an email to ELLE.com. "They are more likely to receive public assistance and less likely to have full-time jobs. They are less likely to have aspirational life plans, like getting a better job or finishing school, and six times less likely than women who receive an abortion to achieve an aspirational plan in the year after being turned away."
Never mind, she adds, the mental trauma that a woman endures when she's forced to carry a fetus to term that she knows won't survive outside the womb.
"The point is there shouldn't be rules about what women can and can't do," Redmond says. "There is no one woman who has an abortion, and it's infuriating and sickening to see how we're treated. We don't need this. We're smart enough on our own."
This story has been updated to reflect that the amniocentesis showed the Redmonds' son had no chromosomal abnormalities.
