Today on Huffington Post, writer Ayelet Waldman has a piece up in response to the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, and the experience she and her husband (acclaimed novelist Michael Chabon) went through in deciding to have a late-term abortion to terminate a pregnancy after tests showed their baby had a genetic abnormality. What struck me most about this piece, apart from its raw honesty, was the way in which Waldman talks about their decision and their child.
Not once in the essay does she refer to their lost baby as a “fetus,” viable or not. Her words are personal, painful, as she describes the days between learning their unborn child had a problem, and the day of the scheduled procedure to end the pregnancy: Over the weekend, we felt our baby kicking. We knew what the procedure would do to him. He had a name. You can still feel, all these years later, the pain these memories cause her.
A name. A baby. A child. A future. A loss.
I applaud Waldman both for writing the piece and for calling it like it is. I am very much pro a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body, but I’ve always been opposed to any attempt to spin abortion as something other than what it is: the death of a baby — or at least the death of the potential to grow into a baby, a child, a teenager, an adult. A zygote or a fetus in its mother’s womb will (unless man or nature interferes) grow to be a baby. Not a chimpanzee, or a tree, or an apple. Pro-lifers use this to their advantage in spinning the idea of abortionists as evil baby murderers. We do nothing to further our cause by allowing the focus of the abortion debate to be over the semantics of fetus vs. baby; the issue is the right of the woman to control her body.

I’m pro-choice politically, though I’ve never had an abortion. I’m not 100% sure I would have one even if my own life was in danger, although I like to think I’d weigh carefully the impact of my death on my existing children in making such a decision. I very nearly died during my last pregnancy, when a blood infection threatened both my life and my son’s so early in the pregnancy that he might not have survived an emergency c-section.
I was about 27 weeks along with the pregnancy at the time. I’d fought to save his life through pre-term labor, endured weeks of hospitalized bedrest and drugs that nearly paralyzed me and could have killed us both by stopping my heart or lungs, survived the blood infection, all to keep our son safe until he was “viable.” The antibiotics they had to give me to keep us both alive when I got the blood infection resulted, we later learned, in our son having frequent seizures the first couple years of his life.
Through the six or so weeks I was in the hospital fighting to keep him inside long enough to give him the best possible chance of survival, he was always my son, my baby, never a “fetus” — not even to the medical staff who cared for us both. They always talked about him as a person through those long weeks, even at 19 weeks when I first started having early labor. “Your baby’s heartbeat is better today,” or “Luka’s kicking strongly today, that’s great.” No doctor or nurse ever once referred to my son as an “unviable fetus” during that time, and I probably would have kicked the ass of anyone who had, whether I was confined to bed or not. Was he a “baby” rather than an “unviable fetus” during that time, solely because he was wanted? Does a lack of being wanted equate to a loss of humanity?
If the doctors had recommended we terminate the pregnancy to save my life because of the damage those drugs might cause to him, I don’t think I would have done it. I don’t believe I could have ended his life while he was inside me, any more than I would have allowed a doctor to kill him at five weeks old when the seizures started, simply because he “might” not develop normally with all the seizures going on. Fortunately, the doctors were wrong in their dire predictions of his future happiness and well-being; my son is alive, he no longer has seizures, and he thrives. He just performed in his first play. He is beauty and light and joy to all who know him.
Many pro-choicers hated that in the film Lake of Fire, they show what an aborted baby looks like. Tiny hands, tiny feet. A heartbeat stopped. I don’t think we should have been bothered by it, if we truly believe in our principles as strongly as we claim. That end result, those severed body parts, are the reality of what abortion is. Why should we avert our eyes from it, disconnect ourselves emotionally from it?
Abortion is a difficult decision for a reason, and hiding behind sterile medical terms won’t change that. We need more women like Waldman who will talk openly and honestly about the reality of late-term abortions: the reasons babies are aborted late in the pregnancy, the struggle parents go through in making those decisions.
We pro-choicers like to hide behind shields of medical terminology to sterilize what it is we’re really supporting. What we logically support when we say “I’m pro-choice” is that we believe the right of the woman to control whether or not she carries a pregnancy to term supercedes the right of the unborn child to be born. Period. And we should own that belief, and fight for it on those terms.

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