Whatever someone’s views on abortion might be. Restricting it at the criminal level is not the way to handle it.

My wife and I were trying for another child a few years back. She’s had multiple miscarriages before so we were working extra closely with the doctors at the Catholic hospital to make sure everything went smoothly because we wanted to have another child that much. Thankfully it only took us 2 attempts to have our twins.

The first pregnancy we went in for our first scan and they found an empty gestational sac. More than that, her labs indicated that she had an ectopic pregnancy somewhere that they couldn’t find on the scans. We were told in no uncertain terms by the doctors that termination was the only option and she would die without it. She was even told that if she tried to refuse they would either have her committed for trying to commit suicide or if that didn’t work they’d wait until she was incapacitated inevitably by her dying from this ectopic they would get me to consent to treatment instead. Again, this is a Catholic hospital whose stated policy is that their doctors don’t even mention termination unless the mother’s life is in danger.

She agreed and they gave her two courses of methotrexate to make sure the ectopic was not going to kill her along with two courses of a drug to try to help her pass the empty gestational sac. When those didn’t work and she came into a follow up showing signs of sepsis they rushed her in for emergency surgery to remove it. That’s 5 different abortive procedures to make sure she didn’t die from this miscarriage.

The second was in my opinion worse. Same hospital. We get to our first scan and the techs are arguing whether or not they see 3 or 4 fetuses on the scan. The possible 4th was really close to a small bleed so they eventually opted to call it 3 for now and amend it later if they needed to. Fast forward to our 20 week anatomy scan and everything has so far gone fantastic. All 3 are growing great, my wife is showing no signs of complications. We’re actually excited to find out the sexes of our coming triplets.

The news we got instead was devastating. One of the two girls, baby C has basically no brain at all. Only a drastically undersized cerebellum. Baby A, the one boy has some physical deformities which on their own wouldn’t be cause for concern, but taken with the other one having virtually no brain could be a sign of Trisomy 18 and if he survived being born at all he likely wouldn’t live past his first birthday. We were referred to a clinic a little over an hour away for genetics testing and for us to make a decision about termination. We get into the clinic and it takes about a week in total between getting an appointment because our scan was the last one on a Friday afternoon and then rushing the genetic tests. In that time we were able to watch babies A and B slip down the fetal growth charts and my wife’s health take a turn for the worse. Luckily the genetics came back fine and baby C is the only one we have to make a decision on. She had no hope of any kind of quality of life and her constant seizures were not only visibly hurting her siblings growth but were making it more and more likely that my wife goes into labor too early to save any of them. If we want to bring any of them home the only reasonable option was aborting baby C. It was probably the most heartbreaking decision we’ve ever had to make.

Fun fact about abortion laws in NY. While it is unrestricted up to 24 weeks and legal afterward if the fetus is not viable or the mother’s life is at risk. Insurance doesn’t necessarily have to cover the procedure if they don’t agree that either of those conditions are true. Looking at our case the doctors were very worried that if we didn’t manage to get in before that 24 week mark that insurance should refuse to cover the termination and this kind of selective termination costs at minimum $10,000.

We managed to get in at 22 weeks and 1 day and this clinic has to have such strict OPSEC because of the kind of abortions they handle that we didn’t know we were showing up for the actual abortion until they were literally wheeling my wife into Pre-Op. 13 days was all that stood between our family and potentially having to basically flip a coin to see if any of them survived. If we had to run our case by lawyers to make sure our abortion was necessary? It’s very easy to see a world where we don’t make that 13 days, insurance refuses to cover the procedure, and all of our babies just die.

Even though this is one of the most painful experiences of our lives, I continue to share this story in discussions I find on this topic because it needs to be said. My twins are only alive because we had abortion access. Whether that’s saving my wife from dying of sepsis from that miscarriage or a “late term abortion” being likely the only reason my twins made it far enough to still be born premature and underweight. If anyone reading this is generally against abortion but thinks in any way that our story was an at all acceptable case of abortion I implore you to reconsider supporting restricting access to it. If someone is considering an abortion that late in their pregnancy it is almost certainly because they’ve gotten similarly horrific news.

That is definitely significantly scarier. If only because it means I might have to talk to someone from Québec.

Not gonna lie, that’s significantly less scary than the snow speaking Finnish.