Without Roe v. Wade, Women in My Shoes Could Be Jailed for Their Miscarriage
(important, disturbing read)
Without Roe v. Wade, Women in My Shoes Could Be Jailed for Their Miscarriage
11/3/2022 by Julia Callahan
Discussions surrounding abortion must always include the loss of wanted pregnancies.
A group discussion with women impacted by miscarriages in Atlanta, Ga., on Aug. 3, 2022. The women were joined by Stacey Abrams (right). (Nathan Posner / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
In July, 2021—one year before the overturn of Roe—a miscarriage nearly claimed my life. Now, women in my same position are now being denied life-saving care and threatened with prosecution for losing their much-wanted pregnancies. Had I become pregnant in July 2022, I may not have survived to tell my story. When I first found out I was pregnant, we had a toddler at the time, and were overjoyed to grow our family. But three days later, when I felt a flood of fluid, my joy was replaced with heartbreak. Having already given birth once, I immediately recognized the feeling as a miscarriage. What I didn’t know was that I was nearly six weeks pregnant with twins, and one fetus would not survive.
In 2019, when Governor Brian Kemp (R-Ga.), signed a six-week abortion ban into law, the constitutional right to an abortion under Roe blocked the ban from taking effect. Since miscarriages often require the same medical treatment as in an abortion, Roe protected access to life-saving care.In my first hospital visit at five weeks pregnant, I planned to confirm my suspicions that I was miscarrying. Yet despite feeling violently ill, my HCG levels showed I was still pregnant. The doctors didn’t know what to do, and could not detect much so early, so they sent me home to wait until I got sicker.
This began the scariest month of my life. I was puking so often that I depleted all of my electrolytes, causing heart palpitations. I’d never experienced anything like it, I feared I would die, and my family feared the same.I needed to see an ob-gyn, but the only ob-gyn in Macon that accepts Medicaid had a two-week wait. This is typical in Georgia, where a lack of Medicaid expansion contributes to increasing hospital closures and fewer options for many of us Georgians seeking care. This also fuels Georgia’s maternal mortality rate, one of the highest in the country, and a number that will only increase since abortion access has been essentially banned. After four more weeks and two more hospital visits, I learned that I was pregnant with twins, and was simultaneously experiencing a pregnancy and a miscarriage—one pregnancy was viable and one was not.
The treatment for my miscarriage was a Rhogam shot, usually safe to administer in the third trimester if you and your baby have different blood types. But since I was still in the first trimester, the shot would put my other pregnancy at risk. After suffering physically and emotionally for nearly six weeks, the decision to get the Rhogam shot was an easy one, because I had a child back home I wanted to live for. I had to survive for him. Within 24 hours of getting the shot, I started feeling better. Fortunately, it did not endanger the viable fetus. But I could not feel relief as the untreated miscarriage caused hemorrhaging in my uterus that put my pregnancy at high risk until I gave birth.
. . . . .
While extremist politicians have succeeded in banning abortion in 23 states, they want to go further by criminalizing the procedure nationwide. If they prevail, grieving parents like me could be jailed for losing a baby they wanted.
https://msmagazine.com/2022/11/03/miscarriage-abortion-roe-v-wade-women/