My Scarlet A

I have literally started this post seven or eight times. It needs to be written, but I don't really know how to do it. So I suppose I just need to plunge in.

I grew up in a conservative Christian home. I did my fifth-grade Government essay on why abortion is wrong, and wore a little red Right to Life rose on the collar of my figure skating costume. As I got older I began to know friends - good friends - who chose to have abortions, and while I would never have made the same choice, I found that I could understand their position. In the end I decided that those who believe fetuses are babies should refuse to abort them, and (within limits) have the right to try to convince women to choose other alternatives, but that government has no business legislating the issue. I, of course, would never have an abortion, but I believed in the right of others to choose to do so.

Then I found myself 12 weeks pregnant with twins - a deliberate, longed-for pregnancy. And one of my twins had Down's Syndrome. And the other was chromosomally normal but had something going very wrong with her development.

I have always supported the idea that people with Down's and other disabilities should be accepted and loved for who they are. But I also knew that as a single mom with no siblings, there was no way I could give a Down's child what he needed, either while he was growing up or when he was grown and I was gone. The thought of him struggling with heart problems, leukemia, and the other problems that often go with Down's, then having me die and him not understand why mommy had left him, broke my heart. I admire and respect people who raise Down's children. I just couldn't do it - for my sake or for his.

The other twin had a fluid-filled sac on the back of her neck, which was divided into several different segments. Some fluid there is normal - up to 2mm - but she had four times that much, and it was increasing rapidly. And the segmentation was most definitely not normal. The doctors weren't sure what was wrong, but the most likely candidates were a major heart defect or a genetic syndrome. If she survived to be born, she might need multiple open-heart surgeries in her first year, which she might not live through. Or she might be disabled - much more disabled than a Down's child.

And so I made an awful decision. A decision I could never, ever have imagined making, but the only decision that made any sense at all at the time. I paid two thousand dollars to have these two beings, whom I already loved, euthanized quietly, with a needle in my womb. And then I had a D&C.

I have cried more tears over this decision than I can even begin to describe. It has changed me deeply, fundamentally. I will never get over it. And yet, faced with the same situation, I can't say I wouldn't do the same thing again. Which may make me a bad person. It certainly makes me a conflicted one.

The thing I regret more than anything is not having waited a little longer to see for sure what was happening with Twin B. There was a tiny chance - 5%-25%, they said - that she would actually have been OK. But I was too terrified of a late-term termination, of feeling her move inside me and then losing her, of having my milk come in when it was all over. I let fear rush me. And so I'll always wonder.

I think a lot these days about how someone lives with having made a wrong choice because of cowardice. What about a soldier who, caught up in the fear and rage of battle, kills an innocent civilian? What do you do with that once you come home? How do you forgive yourself? Or can you?

I still support a woman's right to choose, perhaps more strongly than I ever did. But going through what I did has made me extremely concerned about the carelessness with which some women conceive and abort. I'm fighting for the right to make a terrible choice, as a last resort in a terrible situation. I'm not fighting to protect the right of someone to have four or five or six abortions, because she couldn't be bothered to use birth control. Yes, that's judgmental. And I realize there's no way to legislate the difference. It's just how I feel.

So there it is. I may get flamed from both sides of this issue, but I felt I had to express the truth of what happened to me. Women don't usually talk about terminations unless they're rabidly for or against them. And that's unfortunate, because I think the vast majority of us have a different experience - one that isn't black and white, one that isn't easy. So we end up feeling very alone and isolated.

At Christmas I was sitting in the family room with part of my very large, very conservative family, when one of my cousins launched into a vitriolic anti-abortion rant. Only a few of my forty-some extended family members know I'm trying to get pregnant, and none of them know what really happened with my "loss." So here I was in this supposedly loving Christian environment, under personal attack by someone who had no idea what I had been through, who never even considered that I might be one of those people he was ranting against. It was one of the loneliest experiences of my life. I got up and left the room.

I ended up sitting in the bathroom for a very long time, staring at the soap dish and wondering, as I often do these days, if I even deserve to be a mother.