Most of our friends in Egypt had experienced some form of a pregnancy loss, and we knew this going in. Here, pesticide use is rumored to be responsible for the staggering number of miscarriages, birth defects and stillbirths. Still, when I became pregnant for the third time, during my husband?s first tour with the State Department and our second year living in Cairo, I was thrilled. And when I reached the end of the first trimester, we believed that we had overcome whatever the odds were. I was confident as I lay next to the ultrasound machine. I was also alone. I had done this twice before and didn?t think my husband needed to battle Cairo traffic to be there with me.
My first stretch of quiet in some time left me alone to contemplate this third child. I was showing by then and enjoying the attention of my colleagues, hotel staff and people on the street. I was given a free piece of falafel from a vendor outside. A woman on the street told me I was having a boy, the highest blessing she could have bestowed. I began, in a moment of connectedness and spirituality that hadn?t defined either of my other pregnancies, to love this child.
The technician was cold, quick and calculating with the results. There was a sac present that indicated a cystic hygroma. The cranium was too small and the heartbeat too slow. She told me that I could take two minutes to cry, then could go in to see the doctor. In her words, it was God?s will.
I told her that I was not religious. She apologized. I waited to speak with the doctor, who confirmed that the chances of a healthy baby were effectively zero. The baby would likely be stillborn in the seventh or eighth month. If carried, miraculously, to term, it would suffer from Trisomy 18, likely Down syndrome and heart failure. It did not possess a nasal bone.
As a society, we?ve characterized one type of pregnancy and one type of abortion. A woman can keep a healthy pregnancy, or terminate one that she had been forced to conceive, or that could potentially kill her. We fell outside this dichotomy. But it was within its legal framework that my husband and I accepted that to minimize trauma on my body, and on our family, we had to terminate.
I don?t believe that we didn?t make a choice. Other women may have carried to term, or as close to term as possible, a child whose condition could allow it to live for a few days, or weeks, or maybe a few years. But faced with the impossibility of this loss, we chose to face it then, before a child had the chance to win our hearts and let us hope for the impossible.
The abortion happened in Arabic and English, and I was grateful for the occasional pieces of conversation I didn?t understand. It happened in an understaffed hospital, in which I lay in bed with the fetus for 20 minutes after it was expelled, waiting for a nurse to remove it. I didn?t want to see it, and neither did my husband. That was another choice we had made. We came home that night, drank some wine and focused on my physical recovery. I rested. In the coming days, as we collected and submitted the paperwork for our insurance company, the loss of a baby that we had briefly imagined began to sink in. We had wanted the age gap and family dynamic that we had begun to believe was coming to us. We knocked off work early, and the children ? babies, really, not the oldest and middle child that my fatigued, pregnant body had come to see them as ? ate dinner with us on the couch, smeared hummus over everything and took full advantage of their space to behave as children in a household that loved them and had deeply wanted them from the start.
Then our insurance company responded. Our claim had been denied. Because the pregnancy was not the result of rape or incest and did not threaten my life, it was considered an elective procedure. We relied on federal insurance, the same plan available to all State Department employees. It?s a basic plan, adequate for our typical needs, but bound by legal restrictions concerning federal spending and abortion. We gathered the paperwork necessary to rebut their claim, but knowing its futility, began digging up $5,000 to pay for the abortion.
While the tone and content of the abortion debate has shifted and raged over the past several years, a steady 50 percent have believed that abortion should only be legal under the hardest of circumstances. My insurance company did not lie, and they didn?t make up the rules. In keeping with this moderate stance, they rejected our claim. We can, by giving up a trip home, stretching our grocery budget and ending our date nights, pay for our choice. But what?s been lost in this compromise is how tough that choice can be.
Sheila Sundar is a writer and educator based in Cairo. She develops educational programs for unemployed youth and is currently at work on her first novel.
Source: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/egyptian-abortion-american-choice/
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