No, I'm not an attention-seeking type of person. I tend to be a bit of a wallflower actually. Always have been. But I've been propelled into action by the lack of media coverage and literature available to women who choose to terminate a pregnancy due to a poor prenatal diagnosis. I've been a member of "the club" for almost 5 years now (will be 5 years exactly later this month.) It's a club that no one WANTS to belong to, but one that between 50,000 to 100,000 women in the U.S. join each year. I got that figure based on statistics from the Guttmacher Institute and from the CDC's Abortion Surveillance reports published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly (lovely name, eh?) Those two organizations estimate that somewhere between 6-12% of all abortions are due to medical reasons (either the health of the baby or the health of the mother.)
So, I'm helping to write a book. It's a compilation of personal stories from other women in "the club." Very personal, heartbreaking, and inspiring stories. I'm not expecting this book to be a NY Times bestseller, or to even make any sort of "profit." That's not the point. What I do hope happens is that it can be a source of comfort and support to those thousands and thousands of women who suffer silently each year. The women who aren't comfortable or are afraid to tell their complete story to those closest to them. The ones who feel it necessary to call it a miscarriage and put on a mask of denial each day as they face the world. And I hope it can bring some small amount of awareness to our cause. I know that I had never heard of terminating a pregnancy due to fetal anomalies before it happened to me. I'm not trying to scare pregnant women into thinking something might be wrong with their baby. But I do want people in general to know that when they support restrictions on abortion, they are supporting restrictions on parents like myself who just want to free our babies from suffering.
