A dead end
After her cancer surgery and a third miscarriage, Ms. DeSpain and her husband were surprised and excited when in late 2021 she again became pregnant.
The first trimester seemed blissfully uneventful. As the weeks passed, Finley’s heart started to beat.
But the 16-week ultrasound signaled a turning point. The sonographer was too quiet.
“This is really bad, isn’t it?” Ms. DeSpain asked her sonographer.
The doctors told her he wouldn’t survive. Finley had no heart chambers. His heart couldn’t pump blood properly. He was missing one kidney, and his brain was split in the back. With almost no amniotic fluid, her doctor said he would likely die in utero, crushed to death without support from the protective liquid.
She fought for him anyway. She sought specialty care, followed bed rest orders, and traveled 3 hours to Houston to enroll in a clinical trial.
But every road was a dead end.
Ultimately, testing revealed Finley had triploidy, and all lines led to one point.
“There were too many things wrong, too much wrong for them to fix,” says Ms. DeSpain, recalling the news from her doctor in Houston. “I was in shock. My husband was just sitting with his hands flat on the table, staring at nothing, shaking a little bit.”
However, Finley still had a heartbeat, making an abortion after 6 weeks a felony in Texas. Even a compassionate induction was now out of the question unless her death was imminent.
Ms. DeSpain called the abortion clinic in Albuquerque and made an appointment. She would have to wait 2 weeks because of an influx of pregnant patients coming from Texas.
She welcomed the wait … just in case she changed her mind.
“At that point I wanted to carry him as far as I could,” she says.
For those 2 weeks, Ms. DeSpain remained on bed rest. She cried all day every day. She worried that Finley was experiencing pain.
Through this process, her doctor’s support helped keep her grounded.
“She cried with us in her office and said, ‘I wish that you didn’t have to go, but I think you’re doing the right thing, doing what keeps you safest,’ “ Ms. DeSpain recalls.
Ms. DeSpain declined to share the name of her doctor out of fear that even expressing compassion for a patient’s safety could put the physician in legal jeopardy and provoke harassment.
That fear is warranted. Some doctors will be forced to choose between doing what is legal – even though the law is vague – and doing what is right for patients, says law professor Jamie Abrams, who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.
To live in a world where there’s talk of criminalizing doctors for taking care of their patients, where there’s “this national movement to position some women to be shunned and exiled for seeking care that’s right for them, their health, and might save their life is staggering and beyond comprehension,” says Ms. Abrams, professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law.
Ms. Abrams, who was diagnosed with hormone receptor–positive invasive breast cancer the same day she read the leaked Supreme Court draft on the decision to end of Roe v. Wade, said that “overnight, I became a person who would need an abortion if I became pregnant, because my treatment would compromise a healthy birth or delay necessary cancer care.” Ms. Abrams was also told she could no longer use hormonal contraception.
Dr. Harris’s advice to clinicians is to try to do what they feel is best for patients, including referring them to centers that have legal resources and protections regarding abortions.
Dr. Mims agrees and recommends that doctors reach out to those with more resources and legal backing for support. “I would advise doctors in [states with restrictive laws] to familiarize themselves with available resources and organizations taking action to deal with questionable cases,” Dr. Mims says.