God, I’m torn.
Published by Lisa Kansas June 11th, 2008 in Reproductive Rights, HUH!?When I started reading this article on MSNBC, I thought it was going to be about the tragedies of lethal fetal anomalies and the awfulness that pregnant women who find themselves in the situation of having a fetus with one have to endure, needlessly and dramatically compounded by our anti-choice culture.
Well, it did start out that way.
However, it switched gears rather spectacularly about three-fourths of the way through:
An alternative: perinatal hospice
Directly across a parking lot from Dr. Tiller’s clinic is a facility with a different take on what to do about ill-fated pregnancies. Choices Medical Clinic, a privately funded nonprofit, opened in 1999 and is one of as many as 2,500 “crisis pregnancy centers” nationwide that exist to persuade pregnant women to avoid abortion. Choices was one of the first centers to offer perinatal hospice: end-of-life services for fetuses akin to the standard hospice care available to the sick and the elderly.The facility doesn’t provide primary medical care; deliveries or inductions are done at local hospitals. But women who enlist its hospice services are invited to have free sonograms every day of their doomed pregnancy and, if they find it a comfort, can have free professional pictures taken of them and their dead or dying children after they are born. “Our job is to start from the womb to the tomb,” says Scott Stringfield, M.D., a family physician in Wichita and medical director of Choices. “We try to comfort women and facilitate greater closeness to their child.”
Whoa! Run that by me again..?
Kim Ortmeier, a 35-year-old stay-at-home mom, first learned about perinatal hospice from her obstetrician. She was 16 weeks pregnant with her second child and living in Wichita in December 2006 when routine testing revealed the fetus had holoprosencephaly, a condition in which the brain doesn’t develop properly.
She started working with the center in her 28th week of pregnancy, when delivery seemed imminent. She had two sonograms taken of the baby, a girl they named Madeline, and made plans for both her birth and her funeral. “They offered me constant support in an environment that was very pro-life,” she says. The staff’s positive approach cheered her: “They would be happy when they saw my baby, not all gloom and doom.”
Byron C. Calhoun, M.D., medical director for the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates in Fredicksburg, Virginia, helped conceive the idea for perinatal hospice. In hopes that women facing pregnancy with an adverse diagnosis will choose to carry to term, Dr. Calhoun determined to make spending time with those children — before and after birth — a more compassionate experience. Today some 60 U.S. hospitals, hospices and crisis pregnancy clinics offer perinatal hospice services; in Minnesota, women seeking to abort fetuses with fatal anomalies are required by law to be informed about hospice as an alternative. “Women appreciate the grieving process and being able to spend time with their babies,” says Dr. Calhoun, vice chair of obstetrics and gynecology at West Virginia University School of Medicine in Charleston. “Perinatal hospice gives women an alternative that is a better choice than abortion.”
Happy when they saw her dying and malformed baby? Not all gloom and doom? Because why on earth would the sight of a deformed stillborn baby make anybody all gloomy and doomy? That isn’t what Do-Bees do! They sing and dance and praise the Lord! Celebrate that tiny, twisted corpse being shoved out its mother’s vagina!
In hopes that women facing pregnancy with an adverse diag–oh, I have no time for bullshit weaselwords.
In hopes that women pregnant with a rapidly dying or dead fetus will choose to carry to term–
What term? It’s dead or as good as dead. Fruitful development has ceased. The term is over. All that’s left is how long it takes your body to biochemically figure out it’s sucking up your resources to nourish a tiny human corpse and eject it from you. Carry why..?
But, you know, I am pro-choice. Really pro-choice, which means that if there are women out there that want this…service…I would never remotely contemplate standing in their way. However, the thought of trying to force or coerce in any way, any woman who does NOT want this…Barney-esque circus of septic pregnancy celebration inflicted upon her…makes me really want to vomit.
Pregnancy’s hard. Labor and delivery are REALLY hard. Hard! To endure it all for the reward of a dead, crushed, baby or one that is going to suffer hideously in its few minutes of life after birth, then die?
Anybody who tried to make me would really, really regret it.
But I am pro-choice. So, by all means, sickoes! have your ghoulish death parties. But you’d better not try to legislate them into my life.
oof. When I first read the words “Perinatal Hospice” I thought it was even grimmer - a place where mothers with maternally lethat natal oddities (I don’t know the technical term) would go to live out the rest of their pregnancies and, as such, lives. There are people out there just crazy enough to go into the whole “breath of life” crap and think that their baby is more worth it than they are.
As such, the reality of the situation was a bit of a relief. And frankly, I hope there’s a party when I die too - death should be a celebration of a life that was lived. It’s just, in this case, there wasn’t a life lived. Maybe a life that could have been lived? I dunno. These people are a bit weird, though. And aren’t these mothers actually endangering themselves further? Once you get one oddity in a pregnancy, especially one lethal to the fetus, I imagine it’s not a long road until there are more oddities.
Just to be accurate, I think that they’re talking about things that are considered “incompatible with life” and where the baby dies within hours to days to weeks after birth. Anencephaly. Some chromosomal abnormalities. You referred to a rapidly dying or dead fetus in utero, which is a very different scenario and yes, is dangerous to the mother.
Crisis pregnancy centers wouldn’t have this ghoulish opportunity if hospitals did a better job caring for women delivering babies that are going to die. Not medically but emotionally. Tests are imperfect, and some people choose not to have them, so it’s not always known in advance. People are also imperfect. A family member, while in college, avoided prenatal care, hid her pregnancy from everyone and then gave birth prematurely to what was basically a fetus just a shade beyond the absolute limit of viability. It turned out to be a molar pregnancy with a triploid baby (no, not trisomic — it actually had three complete sets of chromosomes, which is very Incompatible With Life). It was actually very dangerous to her as well — she was preeclamptic and bleeding when she went to the hospital– and while prenatal care wouldn’t have done a thing for the doomed baby, it would’ve kept her safer. I am suspicious of Catholic hospitals in general, but to their credit they treated her with respect and sensitivity when the baby died a week after being born.
So there will be women with no prenatal care or with their own religious and personal reasons for carrying to term a pregnancy that will end with a moribund baby. I think daily ultrasounds a weird idea, and I hate that this is coming from crisis pregnancy centers, but maybe there is a need for “perinatal hospice,” as odd as it may seem and as distasteful the source.
Last I knew, it was considered bad for a woman’s health to have a dead baby on board. Do these folks even allow induced labor when the fetus is dead?
“Just to be accurate, I think that they’re talking about things that are considered “incompatible with life” and where the baby dies within hours to days to weeks after birth. Anencephaly. Some chromosomal abnormalities. You referred to a rapidly dying or dead fetus in utero, which is a very different scenario and yes, is dangerous to the mother.”
I was referring to things that are considered “incompatible with life” as well as fetuses that are actually dead. A fetus that can’t live outside your body is dying; you have it on total life support, just like a adult with a crushed brain on total life support is in fact a breathing, heart-pumping corpse. Frequently fetuses that can’t live outside the womb are “delivered” (if you want to call it that) prematurely, as your body does eventually figure out that it is supporting what is essentially a corpse and proceeds to eject it. Since a fetus like that could be dead at any time and you wouldn’t know it unless you were hooked up to a fetal heart monitor 24/7, I do really feel comfortable referring to such fetuses as “dying or dead.”
I agree that hospitals could do a better job, though the stories I’ve read about the ones that do a bad job generally are due to the anti-choice attitude of the staff to any woman who doesn’t want to pull the deathwatch. As I said, I’m pro-choice, so I absolutely support the right of any woman who feels she needs it for her emotional well-being to wait til she miscarries or has an uninduced stillbirth, and I hope for those women it does end up actually having helped them. I do reserve the right to be revolted by the smug self-righteousness oozing out of the entire story told by said woman and to vehemently oppose legislating pressuring women into doing it, though.
I can’t imagine what these women are going through, so if they want to let nature take its course, then I hope that works out for them.
But why the blistering fuck does this get called “pro-life”? There’s no life there to be pro. They’re just being pro-uterine-contractions.
My son had anencephaly & I carried him to full term. I didnt want to be the one to decide when my son died & I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible. It makes me weird because I love my kid & would like to see him on ultrasound every day???
There was no risk in me carrying my son to full term & had he passed away before birth then my labor would have been induced. No dr is going to make you carry a baby that has already died.
I also dont understand why its weird to want professional pictures taken of my child???
Women are not forced to carry babies with lethal defects..their is a choice. Most mothers find out between 12 & 20 weeks that something is wrong. Well within the legal time frame to have an abortion.
You have to enlist in this hospice service..its not forced on anyone that I can see.
No more than abortion was being forced on me.
forgot to add I am pro-choice & my son lived 33 hours after birth.
LadyGrey”Crisis pregnancy centers wouldn’t have this ghoulish opportunity if hospitals did a better job caring for women delivering babies that are going to die.”
You got that right!
I’m not a big fan of pressuring pregnant women in the guise of offering them “choices” or “educating” them or all the other crap that’s floating around out there. As I said, though, I certainly support the right of any pregnant woman to do whatever the hell she likes about her pregnancy, including having professional pictures taken of her dying newborn and refusing to terminate a doomed pregnancy because it makes her feel better to wait til she miscarries, has a stillbirth, or even prefers to watch her child die in her arms. I also reserve the right, however, to be completely grossed out by people who jump on the bandwagon with a pro-life agenda and start trying to shove this so-called “option” down women’s throats via legislation–EXTRAORDINARILY ghoulish.
Outside of the general pro-life movement and on to a personal level–for me personally, it would be horrible and revolting to watch my deformed and dying fetus every day on ultrasound and then have a professional photographer there to photograph him while he died after birth. For you personally, I have absolutely no opinion about whether or not it was horrible and revolting; I wouldn’t presume to make that call. It was your fetus and you did what you wanted with it and that’s the only part of the situation that I feel compelled to comment on, and my comment is, “I am pro-choice so I agree that you had every right to do what you did without any interference from anyone else.”
I think it’s one of those situations we can’t really understand until in it. I wasn’t the one with the dying newborn, it was my sister, and my emotions were still strong enough that I can’t really imagine what hers were. I think that conceptualizing these fetuses as “deformed” isn’t quite fair, because sometimes they may look pretty normal from the outside, and I can completely understand the desire to spend time holding them and mothering them until they die. I was frankly shocked at how normal, albeit tiny, my sister’s seriously abnormal-by-karyotype baby looked. Even i they did look more obviously deformed — it’s still a planned and loved baby.
i think the daily ultrasound part feels weird to me not because you shouldn’t love your kid and want to see it, but because as a medical person I see it as a medical tool, not a photo booth. it has nothing to do with the viability of the baby: I thought it was equally strange when some celebrity couple supposedly had their own ultrasound for seeing the baby (Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, maybe?).
I guess I just dont see where anyone is being forced into this or that its being shoved down anyones throat.
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Not everyone that has a negative prenatal dignosis wants to terminate. So there IS a need for this service.
You say you are pro-choice, but have a problem with women being told what their CHOICES are when it comes to the life & death of their child.
When my child was dx with a fatal defect I wanted to know ALL of my options. Thankfully I was given the options & I went home, thought about it, researched what would happen if I terminated, and what might happen if I carried to term & I choosto carry on with the pregnancy. Thinking about my child being ripped from my body piece by piece made me feel sick. This was a planned & wanted pregnancy. I respect a womans right to terminate, but that wasnt for me.
I only wish I had had this service around when I was pregnant. It would have been priceless!
Please remember I am a pro-CHOICE, agnostic. Not everyone that agrees with this is a pro-life, Jesus freak!
Nicole, what is coming through really loud and clear here is that you are determined to take personal offense at my revulsion towards the crisis pregnancy center’s version of a “perinatal hospice.”
Think harder about this, please. Do you really think I’d have written a similar post about an article that spoke only of the need to comfort women with pregnancies gone horrible wrong?
If it also bothers you that I personally would find it revolting to participate in the whole “perinatal hospice” scenario, I can’t help you there. It doesn’t bother me that you DID yearn for such a thing, so why do you care that I would run from it like the hounds of hell were on my heels?
Twisting the words of others, especially when those words are clearly printed above your comment in their original context, is pretty pointless. I did not say I had “a problem with women being told what their CHOICES are when it comes to the life and death of their child.” I said, I quote, “I’m not a big fan of pressuring pregnant women in the guise of offering them “choices.”
“Choices” are not CHOICES. If you need an example, go to the Minnesota “Women’s Right to Know” handbook available online–Minnesota is a state where women are required to be informed of their “choices” when seeking an abortion (stated in the article)–not when simply pregnant, mind you–ONLY when seeking an abortion. Here’s the website:
http://www.health.state.mn.us/wrtk/handbook.html
If you are genuinely pro-choice, as you claim, I find it difficult to believe that you would really find that handbook something dedicated to genuinely educating women about their CHOICES. Rather, it is all about “choices,” and pressure, lots and lots of it.
How do you think they’re going to present the option of a perinatal hospice vs. a therapeutic abortion, given how they’re presenting everything else to do with abortion?
The information in that handbook isn’t that far off, really. What is unbalanced about it is that while it accurately gives numbers indicating that abortion is safer than childbirth, it dedicates so much more space to risks and complications of abortion that this fact is lost. The possible complications of continued pregnancy and labor are absurdly abbreviated, while those of abortion are spelled out at length.
And, as you noted, it’s only given to women considering abortion.