By now, everyone has probably heard of at least one woman who couldn't get an abortion and needed one because her baby had a fatal condition and would die soon after earth. The problem is that the conditions these babies have are not always fatal--therefore, the doctors in states where abortion has restrictions and who deliberately tell these women their child will "probably" die are not being good doctors. Any woman who is told by a doctor that her baby has a condition that will "probably" kill it but which does not qualify for fatal condition clauses in state laws should question the doctor.
I refused genetic testing for all five of my kids. There was no medical reason to conduct it in my opinion--if something is "found," I was told at the time there was nothing they can do about it to help the baby better survive. The sole purpose of genetic testing, to the best of my knowledge, is to encourage women who may give birth to a disabled child to have an abortion. The only other thing it can do is cause pregnant women to worry more--which is not good for the pregnancy.
This is not the only story of a woman complaining that she had to leave her home state to get an abortion when she found out her baby had the almost always fatal Trisome 18. The problem is that like other stories I have heard where mothers are told their babies will die, these are almost old wives tales doctors are passing on. This woman, for example, lived to be at least 40 years old with Trisome 18. Doctors tell people their baby will "probably" not live past the first year, but 1 in 20 do. If you have an abortion, your baby will die immediately. Trisome 13 is another "fatal" syndrome. The oldest documented man alive was 31 years old.
Then there is the Florida ad that is being banned by DeSantis. DeSantis is right: the ad is false based on what has been leaked about "Caroline" the Tampa woman in the ad. She was purportedly 20 weeks pregnant when she found out. Once again, doctors played on this woman's emotions and told her she would die and the baby would die if she did not have an immediate abortion. The last I checked, real medical scientists would never say something like this because no one can predict medical outcomes with 100% accuracy. That is the thing that was driven in to me and my father when he was undergoing cancer treatments. He died even without being pregnant. My grandma went through her treatments and lived--and is still alive.
Surgery and radiation are the main treatments for most brain cancers. 1 in 50 people need surgery during pregnancy, so this is a doable thing--although it is recommended to wait until 12 weeks. Her doctors apparently did not advise her of this. In the 1990s--i.e. 30 years ago, there wasn't the technology to pinpoint spots on the body like the head. Now there is. Radiation for cancer can be performed while a woman is pregnant. There are even some chemotherapy treatments that can be given after 14 weeks. Why were these doctors not telling her that at 20 weeks she could begin treatment while pregnant?
Finally, this baby was 20 weeks old. Old school rules that refuse to die state that a baby is "viable" at 22-24 weeks. What that means is that each hospital or government sets an arbitrary time between 22 and 24 weeks where they will attempt to save babies who are born. If the baby is earlier than that, they won't do anything to try to save it and basically will watch it die if it was born alive. This is solely a cost measure that was established to help deal with the ethics of letting a needy baby die. Premature babies--especially this early--cost a lot of health care services. However, AIDS patients cost $32,000 per month for their AIDS medication alone and are susceptible to diseases that do not effect people without it. Are we just going to let AIDS patients die because their care is expensive?
Doctors justify allowing premature babies to die by saying the baby probably would have died anyway. The problem is (as the study above says) that when all babies who are alive at the start of labor are given survival care after birth (as is the law in Japan), 60% survive.
Further, because age is sometimes not accurately predicted, many hospitals instead used weight averages. The hospital where I did an internship in the 1990s set it at 900g. (Don't quote me on that exact number--its been 30 years!) So, if your baby was born at 20 weeks, and it was struggling, they would immediately put it on a scale and see if it was heavy enough. If it met the weight criteria, the doctors would work to save it and even resuscitate it if necessary. Because the weighing was done in a hurry, a few "light" babies were worked on--and survived.
These arbitrary "viability" numbers are so wrong in our medical world today. Babies as young as 19 weeks have survived and are fine. Babies as light as 212 g have survived and are still alive and doing fine. It is crazy that our doctors tell pregnant women they should have an abortion, instead of just letting them give early birth.
Now, if "Caroline" had been diagnosed with terminal cancer at 8 weeks instead of 20, then of course she should have been given the option--have an abortion, undergo treatment, and extend your life by possibly a few years or stall treatment, potentially die within the year (leaving your daughter and baby motherless), and have the baby (she might have had to go on life support the last trimester to continue allowing the baby to grow if the late treatment did not slow its progression). The latter would come with the extremely rare risk that the cancer could spread to the baby, but if they noticed the cancer metastasizing, they could have made the decision about inducing labor early. Instead, the doctors pushed a political agenda, telling her she would die and her baby would die no matter what if she did not get an abortion--at least this is what she says.
Either the doctors lied to her or she is lying to us. Either way, DeSantis should stop it. I mean, I couldn't even make a post on Facebook during COVID that cited the CDC, FDA, and academic papers supporting my conclusion and was against mask mandates. This lady shouldn't be allowed to give out bad health information either.
