On our minds: When creating life means negotiating with death. |
The Dangers of Mixing Pregnancy and Politics |
 | | Thousands of protesters marched through Warsaw in October 2020 in a demonstration against Poland's new abortion restrictions.Maciek Nabrdalik for The New York Times |
|
The most surprising thing about becoming pregnant for the first time was the way it brought death into my life. |
I had never before had much occasion to contemplate my own mortality, let alone that of a future child. But no sooner had my pregnancy been confirmed than, for the first time in my life, my doctor's advice began to treat the prospect of my death, or my child's, as an active consideration. |
It began to feel like a much darker version of the game my friends and I had played with fortune cookies as children, except that instead of adding "in bed" to the end of every fortune, I found myself quietly adding "so no one dies" to the end of otherwise innocuous-seeming advice. |
Don't eat the good cheese, (so no one dies). Don't take that cold medicine, (so no one dies). Don't eat the charcuterie, (so no one dies). |
Later, as I developed complications in that pregnancy and the one that followed, the "so no one dies" advice became less straightforward. Stay pregnant long enough for the baby to survive, but not so long that I wouldn't. Take strong enough medication to avoid a stroke, but not so strong that the baby's heart rate falters. Play the odds. Risk my own survival in order to win better chances for my daughters'. |
We all made it through alive. But once I learned to recognize those negotiations with death, I saw them in others' pregnancies, too. The way that friends' messages about "trying IVF again" meant that they had miscarried multiple times, losses that were deaths to be grieved even though they weren't lives visible to anyone else. Cheerful birth announcements' brief mentions of emergency c-sections, later followed by harrowing discussions of what, exactly, the emergencies had been. As my 30s ticked by, the stories accumulated. Hemorrhages. Ruptured organs. Clots. Infections. Depression and psychosis. Post-traumatic stress. Stillbirths. |
Some of those stories had endings so happy as to seem miraculous. Some were tragic. Others a muddled mix of trauma and joy. But all of them involved decisions that were extremely delicate and extremely personal. People have different tolerances for risk. Different levels of responsibility to others, including other children. Different levels of family support, and of financial resources to pay for support that would otherwise be lacking. Different physical health and mental resilience. And all of those differences meant that there was no one-size-fits-all solution. Everyone had to negotiate with death themselves, and make their own decisions as best they could. |
Laws matter to those decisions. They can give people options, by paying for health care or leave from work. But they can also take options away, tipping the balance of those delicate negotiations with death. |
This week, protests erupted in Poland after news broke that a 22-weeks pregnant woman, identified only by the name Izabela, had died in September of septic shock after severe pregnancy complications. Activists argue that she is the first pregnant person to die as a result of the country's extremely restrictive new abortion law. A lawyer for the deceased woman's family told the BBC that the new law meant that doctors waited too long to terminate the pregnancy. |
Polish law does allow for abortion in cases where the mother's life is at risk. And the hospital that treated Izabela issued a statement saying that their doctors had done everything they could to save the life of the woman, and her fetus. |
But deciding when a pregnancy has become too dangerous to continue is not always a simple decision. Doctors may disagree with each other about when the danger has reached a point of no return. Laws restricting abortion, particularly if they threaten medical personnel with criminal penalties, add a new factor to those delicate calculations — one not concerned with an individual family's needs, but with questions of crime, punishment and politics. Activists argue that Poland's abortion law has frightened doctors enough that they now prefer to wait for a fetus to die rather than performing potentially lifesaving terminations. |
Poland's conservative government passed the abortion law to reaffirm the political arrangement that has been in place there for decades: a symbiotic relationship in which the Catholic Church lends its authority to politicians in exchange for the government's enforcing ecclesiastical morality. |
Abortion restrictions became a symbol of that conservative church-state alliance, making them both a rallying cry for conservative politicians and a flash point for protests by those who wanted a more secular and gender-equal future. When a court ruled late last year that the law should take effect, Poland exploded in the largest demonstrations the country had seen since the fall of Communism. |
I interviewed many of those protesters for a story I wrote last December. Many returned to the same theme: that for the male politicians and priests making these laws, the consequences were abstract, a matter of theological reasoning and prayer, rather than blood and pain. But for people who can get pregnant, it was life and death. |
"I think, I feel, I decide" became a signature slogan of the protests. But the law took effect anyway. And now, for families and doctors, it is part of pregnancy's delicate negotiations with death. |
- I have spent recent weeks buried in truly harrowing reporting for a long-term project, and ended most days feeling too burned out to even watch TV. So I would not have guessed at the outset that a murder mystery set on a nuclear submarine would be the solution to my frayed nerves, but it turned out that Vigil, a BBC miniseries that first aired in August, was exactly what I needed.
|
|
No comments:
Post a Comment