WASHINGTON—The bleeding began just after Donna McNichol’s routine exam in the early weeks of her first pregnancy. “They told me I might spot a little bit after the exam,” she recalled in an interview. “But I wasn’t spotting. I was flowing.”
The pregnancy was planned and joyful. The young California health aide and her teacher husband had just announced it to their families with a celebratory video of themselves playing “Wheel of Fortune.” “I was really blessed,” McNichol, now 49, says.
Her bleeding continued even when she rested in bed. Then the nausea started. “They kept saying that was a good sign, but it wasn’t,” McNichol says. “Sometimes I would pass big blood clots—even the size of my fist.”
Neither her own doctors nor colleagues at the Planned Parenthood clinic where McNichol was working could diagnose what was wrong. She underwent test after test. No well-known aberration that can ruin a pregnancy was completely ruled out—or in. As the blood loss continued, McNichol took a reading of her iron count and discovered it was dangerously low. Fatigue sapped her. “I was just getting sicker because I was losing so much blood,” she says.
New worries arose. She wanted badly to continue the pregnancy, but it was clear that she’d eventually need blood transfusions—and acquired immune deficiency syndrome was just emerging as a little understood menace in the San Francisco Bay area, where McNichol lives. “The blood supply wasn’t screened,” she recalls.
Though her health and her concern about it worsened by the day, she still hoped to continue the pregnancy. But eventually, she began asking her closest relatives and friends what to do. “The worst part of it was that it was never clear,” McNichol says. “I never knew what was the right thing to do.”
At 20 weeks, McNichol had an abortion using a procedure she says fit the description of the intact extraction method that the U.S. Supreme Court banned last week. Afterward, she learned her condition was placental abruption—the placenta, which nourishes the fetus, was breaking up and sloughing off from her uterus. The condition can cause a woman to bleed to death. “It’s one of the causes of maternal death,” McNichol says.
McNichol went on to have two healthy pregnancies. Her children are now teenagers. She first told her story in a friend-of-court brief submitted to the lower courts as the landmark abortion case wound its way upward.
It seems that neither she nor her doctors are callous baby killers who will use any and all means to destroy a fetus they’ve decided to cavalierly discard. And nothing about McNichol’s case supports Justice Anthony Kennedy’s conclusion that Congress is correct to ban an abortion method because “some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained. … Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.” Yet Kennedy wrote that he found “no reliable data” to support this conclusion.
McNichol told me that once she learned that her life had been at risk, the moral qualms that weighed so heavily upon her before choosing to terminate the pregnancy lifted.
The anti-abortion movement has fooled the country into believing that all the Supreme Court did last week was ban a particularly odious and medically unwarranted method of abortion. That is the least of it. The court emphatically said that Congress—not doctors or patients—can decide what’s best for women’s health. The high court ruled that when there is “medical uncertainty” lawmakers can decide what course of treatment is, or isn’t, legal.
We are all Terri Schiavo now. We all can be subject to second-guessing of our family’s medical choices from the halls of Congress.
McNichol’s doctors couldn’t diagnose what was wrong. How could the justices? How could 535 members of the House and Senate—448 of them men—prescribe the best medicine for a woman they’ve never met, let alone examined with a trained eye?
“I have to tell you, I asked everyone—what should I do?” McNichol says. “I never thought about calling up my representative in Congress to ask them what to do. There was no way that someone who has any other agenda but my well-being could make that decision. It wasn’t a political decision. It was a medical, personal decision.”
It is the sort of decision American women no longer can assume they are free to make.
Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is mariecocco(at symbol)washpost.com.
(c) 2007, Washington Post Writers Group
I am one US male who believes that my own ability to make choices is severely diminished by the recent Supreme Court decision against women’s choice. At the same time, I am heartened that something is finally provoking the level of outrage that most of us should have been feeling since Dubya stepped into the White House. Until everybody is as pissed off as I am, there won’t be any change. So be angry. Be very, very angry! And demonstrate!!!
The Supreme Court decision is a horrible one. I’m all for compromise but it is not possible in this case. The fetus is human or it is not. Even if it 99% Human then the mothers legal and moral rights to her body would trump it every step of the way. You either protect the fetus or you don’t. Telling woman they can have some procedures but too dumb to get others is an assault on everyone’s rights. The supreme court only gets to say what is and isn’t constitutional stupidity and insanity remain mine and mine alone
Key89 - How is your ability to make choices severely diminished? I don’t mean this in a combative way, I’m truly curious to hear a guy’s perspective on this.
Marie - love you girl, keep up the great writing!
Waiting for everyone to get as angry as us Key89 is like waiting for an addict to find their bottom…it never seems to happen. This war didn’t surprise anyone, we all knew what it was for and hid behind their lies too-but ever since 9/11, looneytoons began taking away our rights and changing reality by keeping the press under control; we’ve become the most docile people ever known to accept a police state status with little or no fuss-I just don’t get it. Have people been fitted with microchips without their knowledge? Can anyone tell me how we got this way?
I think the problem is much deeper than just the Bush/Cheney team of closet fascists. The root of our crisis lies in the fact that for a great many people in our nation today, the standard of being a moral person is whether or not they think a fetus has a right to come into human existence or whether a woman has a right to bodily/self-determination; or whether the right to marry should be extended to same sex couples, or whether homosexuality is an abberation condemned by God almighty. Because for many the scope of moral discourse doesn’t extend beyond these two issues (although they are extremely important issues, issues of life and death) our nation’s collective moral consciousness is shallow and ineffective. I am not suggesting that we stop trying to protect a woman’s right to protect her body from government interference, but that those of us who consider themselves progressives, or leftists, need to have a more robust moral framework to overcome the simplistic and unfruitful pro-life/pro-choice debate.
That would be 448 persons with absolutely no right to have any say on the issue.