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Ohio laws endanger patients' lives, says Akron woman who had abortion for health reasons

Michelle Price

As the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade rages in the media, the personal impact that these extremist judges will have in pregnant women's lives is getting lost in a sea of politics. Ending the constitutional right to abortion in America is a real crisis for people like me who actually need access to safe, legal abortion.

Last summer, my husband Tony and I were ecstatic when we found out I was pregnant. Unfortunately, that pregnancy ended in a miscarriage but we remained determined to try again. Nine long months later we succeeded: I was pregnant again. 

We were nervous, but we had a healthy ultrasound at six weeks. At 11 weeks, when the chance of miscarriage diminishes to less than 1%, we heard our baby’s heartbeat on an at-home heart monitor. That made us confident enough to start decorating a nursery. Our hearts were full.

But then things changed. At 12 weeks, we saw our baby moving around on the ultrasound — but the doctor also saw some abnormalities that eventually revealed a severe cystic hygroma (a cyst on the neck) and multiple complications. We saw multiple specialists who told us our baby would not survive and that continuing the pregnancy could both endanger my health and my future ability to conceive. A week later, test results showed that the baby had Trisomy 21, or Down syndrome. While trisomy itself is not a danger, the condition was exacerbating the fatal buildup of fluid. We were devastated.

According to the abortion laws in Ohio, any fetus that has been diagnosed with trisomy 21 cannot be surgically terminated, even if they have no chance of survival for other, unrelated reasons. 

My husband and I were facing one of the most difficult, heartbreaking situations of our lives but we could not make our own decision about what to do because the state of Ohio had already made it for us. 

We should have had better options than just waiting for our sick baby to die, risking my life, traveling out of state to a hospital to pay as much as $15,000 out of pocket for an abortion or just lying to an Ohio provider about the reason for the abortion. But elected officials, rather than supporting parents like us, took away those options in the name of political extremism that has nothing to do with our personal situation and what is best for my family.

For a week and a half I carried a baby I knew I would never hold, even as my baby bump was just finally starting to show. On May 10, I said a painful goodbye to my baby during my final ultrasound. Due to COVID restrictions, Tony was not allowed to come with me to the appointment, so I had to say goodbye alone. The following day, I ended my pregnancy at an abortion clinic in Cleveland. I had to withhold the real reason for the abortion to my provider because doing so would expose the clinic to criminal penalties. 

Aggressive anti-abortion protesters yelled and waved giant pictures with graphic images while I went in for the procedure alone, grieving the loss of a child that I had wanted. 

I ended the pregnancy at 15 weeks and I know it was the right decision. But today, I’d be prohibited from making it if faced with the same circumstances because Ohio’s six-week abortion ban is now in effect thanks to the Supreme Court's Roe ruling. I wouldn’t know enough at six weeks of pregnancy to understand the risks of continuing and if I waited until later, when the doctor’s diagnosis came, my abortion would be a crime. 

Stories like mine don’t fit into the neat boxes that our political discussions carve out about abortion. But my experience made me believe more than ever that everyone deserves access to the care they need and that those decisions must be determined by themselves and their doctors — not by politicians who know nothing about the real lives they seek to control. 

I fear that women facing hard decisions like mine, as well as their doctors, will increasingly be vulnerable to criminal punishment. Even when Roe was in place, prosecutors with ideological agendas have been known to treat even miscarriages like crime scenes. Now, without the civil rights protections that Roe created, the persecution and prosecution of pregnant people is likely to only get worse. 

As Ohio lawmakers move to restrict abortion even further, I urge them to keep my story in mind. People get abortions for many reasons, but it is not up to politicians to decide which matter. 

Michelle Price and her husband, Tony, live in Akron.