Walter Einenkel recently wrote a heartbreaking diary, Woman forced to give birth to stillborn in Texas because of 'Women's Health Laws.
There are real victims in the laws created by men to police the morality of a woman’s body. Daniel Mahaffey wrote on an Austin, Texas Reddit thread about his wife Taylor’s pregnancy nightmare—a nightmare exacerbated in no small way by Texas’s HB2 abortion laws. His wife was 20 weeks pregnant in a seemingly smooth pregnancy when a serious complication arose—her cervix began prematurely dilating. Emergency measures at the hospital were taken but to no avail. There was nothing that could be done to save the 20-week-old fetus.
As described in The Daily Beast,
The doctors and nurses at St. David’s Medical Center in Austin cried with them, but said because of Texas law HB2, they could not help speed Taylor’s labor. Technically, the baby was healthy and the mother was healthy, so to induce labor would be an abortion, and to do it at this stage in the pregnancy would be illegal.
The Mahaffeys were sent home to wait for their baby to die or for Taylor’s labor to progress. “We cried ourselves to sleep, waiting for him to come,” Daniel said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
The diary was compelling, and re-blogged by many groups that are deeply concerned with women’s reproductive freedoms:
Feminism, Pro-Feminism, Womanism: Feminist Issues, Ideas, & ActivismDaily Kos SocialThis Week in the War on WomenWomen for BernieTexKos-Messing with Texas with Nothing but Love for Texans A million sayings are constantly floating around in my head, including “There but for the grace of God go I”. Normally this type of thought flits in and out fairly quickly, but when this one popped up while reading Einenkel’s diary, I caught my breath ... and realized … this story could have been about me. I mean literally, it could have been about me. I am one of the tiny number of women who have had a late term abortion; if I had lived in Texas at the time, my experience might have been similar to that of Taylor Mahaffey. I admire the couple’s efforts to speak out against “frankly inhumane and cruel ‘Women's Health Laws’.” I want to add my voice to theirs and share a dirty little secret that most people do not seem to realize: All that late term abortion regulations actually accomplish is to add to the torments of people who are already trapped in living hell. Such regulations get enacted because well-intentioned voters believe they “save innocent babies”, when in reality they are solving a “problem” that does not exist: in the real world, not the world of fevered imaginations, mothers do not have late-term abortions unless there is something very wrong with either the mother or the baby. Most women who have had a late term abortion rarely talk about it. It is very emotionally difficult to share these stories; by doing so one has to relive the pain and grief all over again. Memories come flooding back to me even as I am writing, but I have decided to follow in the footsteps of the brave and wise LGBTQ community, many of whom dared to “come out of the closet.” Those who don’t know any better needed to have EVIDENCE IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES that homosexual people are really not such monsters after all. Those who don’t know any better also need to have EVIDENCE IN FRONT OF THEIR FACES that women who have late term abortions are not monsters either. Passing late term abortion regulations to protect our innocent babies from our awful monster selves is both unnecessary and deeply insulting. The whole premise of these laws is ridiculous: women who do not want to be pregnant take necessary steps to end their pregnancy earlier in the process, when it is easier, cheaper, and much less risky. WOMEN ARE NOT KILLING VIABLE FETUSES IN THE LAST TRIMESTER. THEY JUST AREN’T, and anyone who thinks that they might be doing this has a pretty perverted opinion of women, IMHO. That very thought is misogynist, IMHO. These abortions happen primarily because tragic health issues arise in the mother or the baby during a very much wanted pregnancy. And so, all these laws really do is prevent heartbroken women, full of hormones, grief, and rage, from getting the medical care that their doctor’s would normally proscribe for them, just like Taylor Mahaffey. The suffering this poor woman was made to go through was shockingly cruel and unnecessary.