My Story

Have you ever been involved in a pregnancy you wanted to keep only to have it go horribly wrong at 23 weeks? I did. 


I was pregnant with my baby girl. At our happy "let's find out the gender" ultrasound, it wasn't such a happy find. My baby girl had no brain to speak of, more than 1/2 was a water-filled cyst. It took many torturous days, multiple ultrasounds and an MRI to get as many details as we could. Her internal organs were functioning but she wouldn't be able to survive outside the womb with the brain issue.  My life wasn't threatened, at least not physically.

We had to make the choice at 23 weeks to terminate the pregnancy. Not really a choice when you think about it.  I had to travel to Stanford, check into the maternity ward, get induced, go through contractions, deliver and then not have my baby.  It was traumatic enough to be induced and deliver over 1/2 way through the pregnancy. I can't imagine what it would have been like to carry to term and, at 40 weeks, deliver and have her die.

In addition, I was lucky my insurance paid for this or it definitely would have been adding insult to injury.

You can't make abortion a black and white issue. It's not just teenage girls who don't want their babies. It's not just something someone "irresponsible" uses as a method of birth control. Sometimes things are out of our hands and to force a woman to carry a baby to term who will die is just cruel torture.

I'm not trying to diminish anyone's beliefs, it's just not as easy as you think. That was the hardest experience of
my life and I relive it every day. I light a candle for my baby girl every year.


I'm not looking for sympathy, I'm just hoping my story my help people rethink their ideas that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, or funding should be pulled from anyone who is associated with abortion. It's not that simple.

The Full Story...Everything I Could Remember

The pregnancy seems to be progressing as planned.  We have our exciting twenty week ultrasound.  We didn’t find out the gender of our son before he was born and made the deal that we’d find out with the second.  Due to schedules I was actually 21 weeks when we went in for the appointment.  We excitedly brought our VHS tape to record the video for posterity.  It’s not like I can ever see what I’m looking at in those images but I wanted it anyway.  The ultrasound tech starts on the standard measurements, limbs, head...she stops on the head and is measuring this one area a lot.  I think it looks a little odd but, like I said, I never know what I’m looking at.  She tells us it’s a girl.  I’m ecstatic.  I always wanted one of each!  But we can tell something is not right by the way she’s talking to us.  She says we need to talk to the midwife.

The midwife consults with the OB.  My stomach is sinking with every second.  They tell us that from the first look it seems like the baby has hydrocephalus.  But the OB says she thinks it looks different than that and we need to do further tests.  From here the timeline of everything blurs.  We do another, more detailed, ultrasound and the results are worse.  It appears that it’s not fluid on the brain but fluid instead of brain.  They do an amniocentesis to determine any genetic malformations.  We wait.  And wait.  And wait. The results come in and they find no genetic problems.  Still no answers.  Still no idea what is happening.

We are referred to Stanford for an MRI. We have to wait more.  Every day we wait makes any decision we have to make even more difficult, not only emotionally but physically.  I’m coming up on 22 weeks.  I am late-term. I’m showing. This is definitely a baby.  I have always been pro-choice but I want this baby.  

We drive up to Stanford and get the MRI.  We have an appointment with a neurologist the same afternoon but have a few hours.  I don’t want to be around people. If anyone says “Congratulations” or asks me my due date, I’ll lose it.  We sit in the car and take a nap. We wake up with just a few minutes to spare to get to our appointment.  I did not expect to fall into a deep sleep but it’s no surprise since the last few days had been grueling.  We go to start the car and find we’d left the lights on while snoozing and it didn’t want to turn over.  Luckily on the 3rd try after turning off everything in the car it started.  We couldn’t miss this appointment, it was Thanksgiving week and if we missed it there was nothing we could do until the next week.

This appointment, again, brought even worse news.  The mass was a water-filled cyst that composed nearly half of her brain and there was no corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain.  I was looking for a best case scenario.  There wasn’t one.  I was looking for anyone to “prescribe” termination for me.  I did not want to have it be my decision to end the pregnancy.  No one would do that.  No doctor in their right mind in this day and age can tell a woman she should get an abortion, especially late-term.  We left the neurologist with the horrible news and just started driving.  We had no destination.  We called our midwife with the news. We had to make a choice even though the choice was terminate now or carry to term and have her die.  Even though that’s not much of a choice, we still had to say the words.

We got the name and address of a local OB who would do the procedure and would fit us in for a consultation immediately.  I sat in a waiting room full of happy moms and babies trying not to sob uncontrollably.  I stared blankly into magazines not seeing any of the words.  They called my name.  I met the amazing, wonderful, comforting doctor.  She chose her words carefully, she really said all the right things.  Unfortunately it was the day before Thanksgiving.  We had to make our appointment for the next week.  We had our annual trip to Mendocino to go mushroom foraging.  I packed the baggiest things I owned so no one could see my belly. I tried to pretend I wasn’t pregnant.  I pretended none of this was happening for three days.  I needed normality, an escape.  I couldn’t wait that whole time and think about this at all.  I’d lose it.  I’d go into a depression and not come out.  I wasn’t pregnant that weekend, I wasn’t days away from a late-term abortion.

I mentioned things blurring, yes? Everything blurs for a while and then unfortunately becomes crystal clear, some things I will never forget.

We arrived at the OBs for an ultrasound to determine the feasibility of a procedure where I could be unconscious for the whole thing. I didn’t want to know, I didn’t want to see, I didn’t want to feel. I wanted to go to sleep, wake up and pretend nothing happened.  The doctor performed the ultrasound and measured the baby. She was measuring at 23 weeks. It was too physically dangerous for me to have the “extraction” technique.  I would have to be awake, be induced and deliver my baby girl.  We went to the hospital to check in and start the nightmare process.  I had the option of coming back to the hospital near my house but that’s where I had my son and I didn’t want to tarnish that memory with this. I needed to be far from home, somewhere I will hopefully never have to be again.  Since we weren’t going home and I was going to be awake we went to the mall and I got a CD player, headphones and a Tori Amos CD. One I already had, I have them all, and would later give to a friend but I needed her. We got into our room and I asked for whatever drugs they could give me.

There’s something important to add here.  When I delivered my son, I did it completely drug free and naturally.  I am terrified of epidurals.  I had a myelogram in the eight grade which was probably the most traumatic experience of my life.  They made my mom leave the room, the stuck a needle in my back while I screamed and cried. They were looking for a blockage in my spine to explain why I kept passing out randomly.  Looking back, the fainting was probably anxiety but in 1988, no one was diagnosing that. I also have scoliosis so to add to my fear of needles in my back there’s also the danger of my spine not being straight and them missing what they’re shooting for.  I was more afraid of the epidural than I was of labor pain.  It worked out the first time around, I didn’t need a c-section so I powered through the pain and had my beautiful baby boy without the needle.

This time though, I didn’t want to feel anything and they wouldn’t knock me out.  My husband and I sat up all night waiting for the pitocin to kick in and start contractions.  I asked for the strongest sedatives they could give me.  They gave me two of something with absolutely no effect. I was still freaking out.  I kept telling them I didn’t need to be alert and aware and they didn’t need to worry about the health of the baby or I wouldn’t even be there. I wanted them to dope me to the gills and they wouldn’t give me anything else.  Therefore they were putting the epidural into my back while I was screaming and crying and my husband was standing there trying to comfort me but there was nothing he could do and after what seemed like an eternity of me freaking out, he asked for a chair but no one was paying attention to him and he fainted.  He didn’t faint from the sight of the needle which they kept trying to attribute it to but the fact that we had both been awake all night and he couldn’t physically deal with me being in so much pain.  It’s weird to say but him falling was probably a good thing for me. It shifted my focus to him instead of the epidural process.  He unintentionally did the best thing he probably could have done for me and made it not about me for a minute.

With the epidural in, I just had to wait, numbly, in bed. The contractions were happening, unnaturally, far apart and I couldn’t feel them as contractions but just tension. A nurse came in to talk to us about the delivery and ask if we wanted to see the baby.  I adamantly did not. The problems she had were invisible, I didn’t want to see how beautiful, if alien and tiny, she was. We were clear about this and my husband was in complete agreement.  I have a picture in my head of what she would have looked like. That’s enough for me.

I had an overwhelming, painful urge to pee.  I rang for the nurse, since I was numb, I couldn’t get up.  I had a ring multiple times but she finally came and set me up. After I went I realized the pain didn’t go away. I was actually having major contractions and they called in the OB.  I had no idea. When I was in active labor with my son there was no question; I was feeling everything.

It was time.

I will never forget staring into my husband’s eye and crying as I pushed. I will never forget the feeling of her tiny body coming out.  Apparently the nurse who had asked us if we wanted to see her almost brought her to me. She thought I needed closure because she had been through a similar loss and thought it was best to see the baby for closure.  Luckily the doctor stopped her.  She lived for 23 seconds.  She weighed 23 ounces.

After she was born I went into a fit of shivering and shaking that I could not stop. I had completely lost control of my body.  After the fit subsided they moved me from delivery to recovery.  When a baby is stillborn, they put a black card on the recovery room door so all the nurses and attendants know and don’t say the wrong things.  That meant that everyone who came in gave their condolences which was caring and sweet but painful every time.

I thought we were done, I would recover, go home and grieve.  We weren’t done.

Since the baby was born breathing, she had to have a birth certificate. We had a choice as to whether to give her a name or have her be “baby girl.”  After the first ultrasound, before we knew about the cyst, we had decided her name was going to be Emily.  So we filled out the birth certificate form with “Emily.”  It seemed like every step of the way someone was trying to make me deal with this and not just let it go as quickly as I could.  Since we had a birth certifcate, we also had to deal with the death. There was a body. There is an organization founded by a family who lost a baby late term who pays for the funeral parlor services for other families who have to go through this.  I was grateful. Nevertheless, we had to leave the hospital and drive to the funeral parlor.  It’s been there forever, you can tell. It’s been built around. To the east and north of the building is the “bad” part of town; run down buildings, kids in hoodies on the street corners.  To the west is the freeway.  To the south is IKEA.

We got there before the funeral director had gotten a call from the hospital so we had to explain why we were there and he had to call to get the details.  I remember him saying “So, she was 23 weeks.”  And I kept saying “She was 23 seconds.”  We filled out the paperwork, signed what needed to be signed, and drove home.  

Waiting at home was my beautiful three year old son and my mom who was taking care of him while we went through all this.  We had to tell our son he wasn’t going to have a baby sister anymore.  She got too sick to live.  He seemed to understand but just went on with his playing.  I don’t think kids that young really process that sort of information.

I stayed in my bedroom for most of the day for many days.  We sent out an email explaining I was no longer pregnant and to please not bring it up with me unless I bring it up first.  I filed all the replies away without reading them.  The day after we came home my milk came in. It hurt. A lot. When your milk comes in after a live birth, your nurse to relieve the pressure.  I had no one to nurse and I didn’t want to promote lactation by pumping. I just had to apply ice and wait out the pain.

Eventually that too subsided.  I left my room little by little.  Eventually my mom went home and I started taking my son to preschool myself again.  I emerged back into the outside world.  Life got back to normal.  About a year later I was lying down with my son at bedtime and he said, “Wasn’t I going to have a baby sister?”   I told him he was and he said, “But she died.”  I said that she did and we both cried together.  He still brings her up from time to time when someone talks about siblings.  Not a single day goes by that I don’t think about her.  

We sponsor a girl in Mexico named Lesly who was born on the day Emily was born: November 27, 2007.  I wanted that date to have something positive associated with it.  It works a little.  Still, I light a candle for Emily every year if I can.