Cause if you saw me on the street with my son and my husband
and you're like, oh,
what a happy, lovely family and we are,
but you have no idea the hell it took to get here.
I was 17 weeks in one day the day we got our diagnosis
and I was 19 weeks in two days by the time we were able to access care.
So I go into the maternal fetal medicine office,
which I'd never been in before because my doctor had referred me there.
And we go in and the ultrasound technician is,
you know, normal,
talking to us, everything's fine.
And she starts doing scan.
I don't know anything is wrong.
I'm just sitting there. She's like,
okay, here's the hands,
here's the toes, we're gonna count them,
you know, all the stuff.
And, um,
she goes quiet and she stopped talking to us.
And the doctor came in and he said,
they saw something on her spine,
I just wanna check. And he goes up and go up, up,
up. And then we see it on the screen and it's like a bubble
and it's her skull is not closed and her brain is cutting,
coming out into it. And he didn't even say,
he just said, this baby's not gonna survive.
And I remember being like,
excuse me, can you say that again?
And he said, this baby will not survive.
And I said, I don't understand what you're telling me.
I said, can we get surgery?
I said, I will travel.
I will go to the best medical care.
I will do whatever it takes.
And he's like, you're not,
listen, like,
she is not going to live outside of you.
And I said, okay,
well, what happens next?
He was very straightforward with us.
And he said, you can continue your pregnancy if you'd like.
This is what this will look like.
You will come in weekly for scans
and wait for her to die inside of you
so we can induce labor. Great,
great option. Um,
you can go care. You can carry the term.
He said, that's not likely,
but you can, if you carry the term and we do labor,
she will suffocate to death in front of you.
Um, or you can terminate your pregnancy,
which is going to be the best option for your future fertility.
Um, because he knew we wanted to be parents,
and that was the fastest way we could try again for another baby.
And so I think a lot of people,
there's like, I don't know.
I think people think there's some sort of
secret option that we're just ignoring when,
when you make these decisions.
And in that moment, I knew I,
I didn't want to be pregnant anymore.
And I knew that. I just knew that in my gut.
I just knew that it was not going to be okay.
And I, I didn't want to continue.
My pregnancy, I was becoming very visibly pregnant at that point.
And that's really hard to be visibly pregnant.
Carrying around a baby who's dying is like really hard.
Um, and so I asked him,
I said, okay,
well, how do we terminate the pregnancy?
And he said, you can't in Texas.
He said, he said,
if this was a few years ago,
your doctor, your OB GYN
could have done this in a hospital
and you would be with your family and you have to leave.
And so he gave me a piece of paper because it was still like,
they wouldn't even give me my medical records.
It was a whole thing. But he gave me a piece of paper
with the name of a clinic in New Mexico
and he said, call them.