01-24-2019, 01:14 PM
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see you later, I'm gone
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 14,066
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Quote:
In the late spring of 2016, Erika Christensen was thirty-one weeks pregnant, and found out that the baby she was carrying would be unable to survive outside the womb. Her doctor told her that he was “incompatible with life.” Christensen and her husband wanted a child desperately—they called him Spartacus, because of how hard he seemed to be fighting—but she decided, immediately, to terminate the pregnancy: if the child was born, he would suffer, and would not live long; she wanted to minimize his suffering to whatever extent she could.
Christensen lived in New York, a state where, since 2014, an estimated twenty-five to twenty-seven per cent of pregnancies end in abortion. Abortion was legalized in New York in 1970, three years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. Abortion was a crime in most other states; in New York, it became a crime with major exceptions. It is still regulated in the criminal code, and, Christensen learned, it is a crime in New York if an abortion is performed after a woman is twenty-four weeks pregnant, unless the mother’s life is in immediate jeopardy. Even though the baby in her womb would not be able to live outside of it, she would have to go elsewhere to have an abortion.
Politicians had been attempting for nearly a decade to pass a law called the Reproductive Health Act, which would remove abortion from New York’s criminal code and codify the protections of Roe v. Wade, which affirms a woman’s right to an abortion, with limits, in state law. The R.H.A. had been approved multiple times by the Democrat-controlled state assembly, but it had never passed the state senate, which was controlled by Republicans.
Christensen and her medical team made arrangements for her to travel to Colorado, where abortion is essentially regulated like any other medical procedure. With help from her mother, she scrounged up more than ten thousand dollars to pay for the procedure and the trip. In Boulder, a doctor named Warren Hern administered an injection that stopped her baby’s heart but prevented her from bleeding and going into labor. Afterward, while waiting for her flight, she could not help feeling as if what she’d done was shameful and illegal. She flew back to New York and had a physically excruciating stillbirth at a hospital.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-...nd-how-it-wont
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