What It’s Like to Seek a Late Abortion in the “Most Pro-Life” State in America

Irin Carmon at MSNBC reports on a young couple in Oklahoma: Jessica and Erick Davis, whose unborn child was diagnosed with a “severe brain malformation known as holoprosencephaly,” a condition that makes it “rare, though possible, for such a fetus to survive to birth.” Doctors told Jessica that her son wouldn’t make it to his first birthday, that he’d never be able to lift his head. So she chose to seek an abortion rather than, as she says, let her son suffer. But:

The University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where the Davises were diagnosed, once provided later abortions for women whose fetuses had been diagnosed with lethal anomalies. It is now forbidden from doing so by a 2007 law banning abortions in public hospitals.A second law, passed in 2011, banned abortions statewide after the 20-week mark of a pregnancy on the theory that fetuses could feel pain at that point. In Oklahoma, that law has no exceptions for fetal anomaly.

What’s happening in Oklahoma? Republicans hold a supermajority in both state chambers as well as every Congressional seat. Not a single county in Oklahoma went blue for either of the last two elections. Part of what this means is that, “since the consolidation of Republican control in 2010, the state legislature has passed at least sixteen laws relating to abortion, often with “no” votes in the single digits.” These movements are led by congressmen like this:

Rep. Mike Ritze claimed that Margaret Sanger, the founder of what would become Planned Parenthood, got the idea from Adolf Hitler. The fact that Sanger opened her first clinic in 1916 seemed of little interest to Ritze. Asked what he thought of the term “war on women,” he said: “I’ve heard about it and I’ve heard some of the feminists talk about it. But I really don’t think there is a war on women unless you go to an Arab country.”

So, this is what it was like for Jessica Davis to seek an abortion for fetal abnormality: she and her family (including three children) drove to Texas and had to sleep in their car because they couldn’t afford a motel, because the abortion cost five times their tiny monthly income (they are unemployed and Jessica gets $700/month for disability), and can you imagine sleeping in your car after an abortion that took three days to complete? At the beginning of the article, Jessica says she cried herself to sleep.

Protesters outside the clinic tried to hand Jessica a pair of baby socks. She told them to go to hell. She left the clinic with a death certificate, which she and Eric had asked for, and a footprint of the son they named Mark Gordon Scott Davis. The funeral homes Jessica called for a “proper burial” laughed at her, or hung up “because I mentioned the word ‘termination,’” she said. The funeral homes told her she had an abortion. “I don’t look at it like that,” Jessica said. “I’m showing my son mercy.”

Saluting Irin Carmon for this story, and Dr. Susan Robinson for good measure.

Photo via Pam Morris/flickr

[MSNBC]