Why This Woman Chose Abortion—at 29 Weeks

Dana Weinstein’s fetus could have died after birth or been very severely disabled. Yet the GOP still wants to force women like her to carry to term.

— By Kate Sheppard

When Dana Weinstein talks about her second child, she refers to her “angel baby.” In the summer of 2009, with a 2 1/2-year-old son and a daughter on the way, the Weinsteins were looking forward to completing their family. Then tragedy struck. After a sonogram 29 weeks into her pregnancy, Weinstein learned  her daughter’s brain hadn’t formed properly and that the baby would face severe health and mental problems, if it survived at all. Several weeks later, she made the painful decision to end the pregnancy before “Baby W” was born. Now Weinstein fears that if Republican legislators around the country succeed in banning abortions after 20 weeks, many women in similar situations will no longer have the option that she did.

I spoke with Weinstein on a Friday afternoon last month via phone. She was home in Rockville, Maryland, and her seven-month-old, Danica, could be heard crying in the background. Weinstein, who works in development, cooed at Danica, who was born a little over a year after the loss of “Baby W.” Weinstein decided to tell me her story after reading about the new state laws—many without exceptions for cases where the health of the mother or the baby is at risk—that have made abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy illegal.

Weinstein learned of the problems facing her baby just weeks after George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who was one of the few in the country to offer late-term abortions, was gunned down in his church by an anti-abortion extremist. She remembers watching the news coverage that May. “I sat there rubbing my belly thinking, ‘I don’t know how anybody this late in the pregnancy could have an abortion,'” she remembers. “That was my entire attitude.…I was always for the right to choose, but I didn’t understand why someone would have a late-term abortion.”

A few weeks later, Weinstein understood. On June 26, 2009, she went in for a routine sonogram to check the progress of “Baby W.”

The sonogram detected abnormalities. The technician noted that the ventricles in the baby’s brain were enlarged and that the fetus seemed to be having difficulty swallowing. An MRI several weeks later confirmed that the baby suffered from multiple malformations of the brain. The connections between the right and left brain had not formed, a condition called agenesis of the corpus callosum. The baby also had polymicrogyria, a severe brain condition where the ridges don’t form properly, which can cause intellectual and physical disabilities, as well as seizures that are “difficult or impossible to control with medication,” according to the National Institutes of Health.

“We noted a number of different brain malformations,” explains Rhonda L. Schonberg, the coordinator at the Center for Prenatal Evaluation at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, DC, where Weinstein was given the diagnosis. “Her fetus was really at a significant risk for developmental delay and seizure disorder.” It was a rare diagnosis, and it’s unclear what caused it, Schonberg says. It is also a condition that was not clear in Weinstein’s 20-week checkup; most brain development occurs in the third trimester, so it would have been difficult to foresee this earlier in the pregnancy.

Weinstein was faced with the prospect of giving birth to a baby that was expected to suffer from nearly constant seizures, could have required feeding tubes to stay alive, and could have been in a vegetative state, if it survived at all. She decided to end the pregnancy rather than continuing for another two months and prolonging the suffering. It was a very personal decision, she says, one made between her, her family, and her doctors. “We wanted her and loved her,” Weinstein says. “In some ways I feel a little bit lucky, in that she was so sick that the decision was almost made for us. I don’t wrestle with guilt.”

Even though she lived in Maryland and saw a doctor in Washington, DC, Weinstein found it difficult to obtain an abortion so far along in her pregnancy. There were no doctors, at the time, that offered the procedure at her stage in the Washington area. She had to travel to Dr. Warren Hern’s clinic in Boulder, Colorado, far from her support network. Weinstein spent a week in Colorado between the initial visit with the doctor and the actual procedure, all the time worrying that the baby was suffering. It wasn’t until July 14 that she was able to undergo the procedure. “I don’t have words to describe the agony of those days,” she says. But, “knowing how sick the child was, I can’t imagine ever being forced to carry the baby to term.”

The ordeal was expensive. The Weinsteins racked up $17,500 in medical bills, and it took a lengthy fight with their insurance company to get the procedure covered. There was also airfare and the hotel stay to cover. Seeing the difficulties a woman who decides to end a pregnancy faces in doing so, even in a state where abortion is legal after 20 weeks, was one of the reasons Weinstein felt compelled to share her story.

That anti-abortion groups have premised their 20-week bans in a number of states on “fetal pain” ignores the fact, Weinstein says, that in her case she sought to end the suffering of her baby. “I’m not going to be made to feel ashamed because I allowed her to have a peaceful death,” she says.

It was only later that Weinstein and her husband found out that “Baby W” was a girl. Weinstein, a petite woman with long brown hair, now wears a necklace with a butterfly pendant. A smaller butterfly with ruby-studded wings dangles from it, the birthstone for July—the month Baby W died. A photo of her seven-month-old is affixed to the back of her work ID.

Abortions like Weinstein’s are quite rare. Only 1.4 percent of all procedures occur at 21 weeks or beyond, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Most of those procedures happen because a life-threatening medical problem or a fetal abnormality only became apparent at a later date. But even in Washington, DC, there are few options for women in Dana’s situation who seek an abortion. Hern’s office was the closest clinic for late-term abortions when Weinstein obtained her procedure, though another provider has since opened an office in Maryland.

With the additional barriers that anti-abortion activists have erected around the country, Weinstein worries about other women in her position. “Abortion is a right, and if that right is taken away, people like me won’t be able to make the choice that is right for their child in pain,” she says. “I couldn’t sit back and watch women’s rights be chipped away by people who have never walked in these shoes.”

Top 10 Attacks from the GOP War on Women

But First My Little Rant…

All I want to know is why does the GOP hates women and children so much. They don’t wan’t women to be able to make the choice for themselves whether, or not to have a baby. But they seem blatantly against any social program that will help these mothers and children survive. These are the same men and women who are working to cut funding to Planned Parenthood, one of the few places many women have access to proper medical care, where they can also learn about safe sex, and yes they do offer abortion care.

How can you expect people to not need assistance, when all you have taught for years is abstinence. When you keep cutting back sex education, people will get pregnant, they will also get expensive to treat sexually transmitted diseases. Pregnancy can be both emotionally and financially devastating. It seems as though the GOP is trying to legislate these women into families that most likely don’t exists. Do they think that cutting a program for food for a young mother, means that a father that hasn’t been around will suddenly start providing. Because it doesn’t, it just means that one more child will go hungry.

I am not advocating people use abortion as birth control, but our government has no right to interfere in someones medical care, and abortions are medical decisions.  An abortion is not something anyone would ever take lightly, and doctors over see the whole process. It isn’t flippant, it’s a serious procedure.  Would it be better to go back to the days where American woman were forced into back ally abortions, where mothers, and sisters, and daughters died of infection; just so the men in charge could say that we don’t have any abortions in our country?

I also highly doubt the wisdom of removing basic social programs as a means cutting debt; while allowing more and more large companies inflated tax cuts.  Who are the GOP representing our nations men and women, Big Business, or their Church?

Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP War on Women

1: Republicans not only want to reduce women’s access to abortion care, they’re actually trying to redefine rape. After a major backlash, they promised to stop. But they haven’t.

2: A state legislator in Georgia wants to change the legal term for victims of rape, stalking, and domestic violence to “accuser.” But victims of other less gendered crimes, like burglary, would remain “victims.”

3: In South Dakota, Republicans proposed a bill that could make it legal to murder a doctor who provides abortion care. (Yep, for real.)

4: Republicans want to cut nearly a billion dollars of food and other aid to low-income pregnant women, mothers, babies, and kids.

5: In Congress, Republicans have proposed a bill that would let hospitals allow a woman to die rather than perform an abortion necessary to save her life.

6: Maryland Republicans ended all county money for a low-income kids’ preschool program. Why? No need, they said. Women should really be home with the kids, not out working.

7: And at the federal level, Republicans want to cut that same program, Head Start, by $1 billion. That means over 200,000 kids could lose their spots in preschool.

8: Two-thirds of the elderly poor are women, and Republicans are taking aim at them too. A spending bill would cut funding for employment services, meals, and housing for senior citizens.

9: Congress voted yesterday on a Republican amendment to cut all federal funding from Planned Parenthood health centers, one of the most trusted providers of basic health care and family planning in our country.

10: And if that wasn’t enough, Republicans are pushing to eliminate all funds for the only federal family planning program. (For humans. But Republican Dan Burton has a bill to provide contraception for wild horses. You can’t make this stuff up).