Week 25: The Edge of Viability

by Sharon Tjaden-Glass

A baby cannot survive outside of the womb prior to 21 weeks.

At 23 weeks, it has a 10-35% chance of survival with significant intervention.

At 24 weeks, it increases to the 40-70% range.

At 25 weeks, it’s 50-80%.

At 26 weeks, it’s 80-90%.

In this short time span, some women end their pregnancies. Many of them have received devastating, terminal diagnoses at their 20-week ultrasound scan. Diagnoses that end with the crushing phrases like, “little chance of survival” or even “incompatible with life.”

Anencephaly. Bilateral renal agenesis. Severe spina bifida. Severe heart and lung defects.

 

To obtain an abortion past 20 weeks inspires the ire of millions of anti-abortion advocates. This anger has boiled over into politicized (not medical) terms like “partial birth abortion.”

Yet only 1.2% of all abortions are performed after 21 weeks in the United States.

preemie

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As I stand here on the edge of viability, I ask my fellow citizens who are the most enraged about second trimester abortions this:

Do you think that I would choose to end this pregnancy for some selfish, frivolous reason?

After having coming so far?

Through nausea and indigestion

Fatigue and weight gain

Only to decide to end this pregnancy because I don’t realize the sanctity of life?

Do you think that I don’t feel the weight of this life inside of me?

Do you trust me to understand what it would mean to end my pregnancy at this point?

Or do you think that I need laws to keep me in my place?

Do you trust me to carry this life?

Do you really care about my child?

Do you really care about me?

 

And if you say that you do…

Does your concern for the well-being of my child end once it’s in my arms?

Would you do an about-face once my child is born and tell me now it’s your responsibility, not the government’s?

Do you care whether my child and I have an income

while I recover from the stretching, the pushing, the tearing, the leaking, the constant waking, the weeping?

Does your heart break like mine does when I have to return to work just six weeks later?

Does it?

 

If we want to respect the sanctity of life, that means respecting the mother who carries that life as well.

It means not turning up your nose when someone bemoans our nation’s lack of guaranteed, paid maternity leave.

It means not decrying the fact that your taxes are used to pay for programs like Medicaid, WIC, Head Start, food stamps, and subsidized childcare.

It means not demonizing clinics like Planned Parenthood, which millions of women rely on for their health care services.

It means that you don’t flag down a store’s security guard to report that a woman is breastfeeding her child in public.

To me, the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” don’t completely encapsulate what we’re talking about.

What is “life” without health?

Who “chooses” death over life?

These are the questions that the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice” evoke. And I think they entirely miss the point.

I believe and will always believe that pregnant women feel the weight of the life inside of them.

It can be exhilarating.

It can be terrifying.

But I don’t think that pregnant women feel nothing.

To characterize the need for second trimester abortion restrictions as a way to “keep women from killing children” does a great disservice to what many of these mothers and fathers face when they walk out of the doors of their 20-week ultrasound.

Reeling from the worst possible news.

Figuring out whether to or how to end the pregnancy

Determining if they’ll have to travel to another state in order to do so

Wondering if they will be expected to “explain” to family, friends, co-workers, and even acquaintances why they are ending the pregnancy.

Waiting for judgment to fall on them.

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