"Why did I have to fly to another state to get the care I needed?"
At 15 weeks, she was given two options: terminating the pregnancy or waiting to miscarry.
At 15 weeks, she was given two options: terminating the pregnancy or waiting to miscarry.
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00:00Nobody wakes up in the morning and says,
00:02oh, I think I'll have an abortion today.
00:04That's just not true.
00:20With this condition, it was 100% incompatible with life.
00:24My baby did not have a functioning brain.
00:28And to this day, I still have the ultrasound pictures
00:32that I share with people so they can really, really see
00:35and understand what I was feeling.
00:38Up until that point,
00:39I thought it was a perfectly healthy pregnancy.
00:43And so hearing that news was extremely devastating to me.
00:47What was more devastating
00:49is that my doctor gave me two choices.
00:53And one was to terminate the pregnancy
00:56and two was to continue to carry the baby
00:59until I miscarried.
01:01And not knowing when I would miscarry,
01:03because these babies typically miscarry early
01:06in the pregnancy,
01:07my doctor said if I was to go to term
01:10that it would be a stillbirth.
01:12And so the option that I chose immediately
01:16was to terminate the pregnancy.
01:17I asked the doctor,
01:19so does that mean you admit me to the hospital?
01:23How do we now terminate the pregnancy?
01:26And the doctor said to me,
01:28well, in the state of Texas,
01:30it is considered an abortion
01:32and I would have to refer you out to an abortion clinic.
01:36Here I was with a fetal anomaly
01:38and yet I'm going through the same process
01:41that every person that has an abortion
01:43has to go through in the state of Texas.
01:46And I just couldn't believe that because it's our choice.
02:21Now in Florida, I did have to go through an ultrasound,
02:24but I did not have to look at the screen.
02:28And so when the doctor took the ultrasound,
02:31the first thing he said is,
02:33I am so sorry.
02:35I am so sorry.
02:36These cases are hard and we're gonna take care of you.
02:41And fortunately I was able to have the abortion.
02:45I was still confused about why I had to go
02:49through all of that to have the abortion.
02:52Why did I have to fly to another state
02:54to get the care that I needed?
02:57♪♪
03:09I knew that continuing to carry this pregnancy
03:12would be emotionally and physically traumatic.
03:16Oftentimes you hear,
03:17yeah, you can have an abortion
03:19in the cases of rape and incest,
03:21but it's very little about a fetal anomaly,
03:26especially one that is 100% incompatible with life.
03:30And so that's how I really entered into the advocacy
03:34on abortion care, on a woman's rights,
03:38and just shared my story over and over again
03:41to give individuals a different perspective
03:44of what it's like to have an abortion in late term.
03:47♪♪
04:01The fact that the court has taken this up
04:03means that they might want to look at their own precedent
04:08and make some changes.
04:09And that's really scary
04:10because what the question that the court is looking at
04:13is whether or not pre-viability abortion bans,
04:18so basically abortion bans before 24 to 28 weeks,
04:23which was promised by Roe, are constitutional.
04:27This is the moment that we've been warning about
04:31for a decade and the moment
04:32we've been really worried about for so long.
04:34♪♪
04:47No one knows what that person is going through
04:51when they have to make that decision.
04:53They could be in a domestic situation.
04:56They could be in situations where the doctor tells them,
04:59as the doctor told me, that this isn't a viable pregnancy.
05:03No one asks those questions.
05:06They just don't.
05:07After I spoke, there were a lot of people
05:10that came up to me and just commended me for my courage.
05:14And not only did they commend me for my courage,
05:18they also told me that they had a similar situation,
05:21but they told their friends and families
05:23that they had a miscarriage.
05:26So to me, that was confirmation that I wasn't alone.
05:34♪♪
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