Life Support

The woman on the table is gray and bloated. Though she is a year younger than I am, it is impossible to estimate her age as time spent alive on machines has changed her appearance, her skin is puffy and stretched and her abdomen is unnaturally distended. 

Since January, her lungs are kept functional by the ventilator and her blood circulating with the help of another machine operating to relieve and rest her heart. She had heart disease before her pregnancy and, one day after delivery, developed heart failure which was complicated shortly thereafter by respiratory failure which was complicated by clotting and an amputation of her limbs. She has had better days and worse days, but most of the recent ones have been frightening and all of her tests demonstrate her body is failing. She is dying.

Her room is silent, filled only by the whisper of the nurses who plea urgently to one another that the care team should be more assertive with the family; their beloved daughter and wife will not recover and she is nearing her final minutes here. This will be her last ever spring and she will not feel the heat of another summer. She will not hear the crisp leaves beneath her feet in fall or look in awe as the early tulips challenge late snowflakes.

I assess her abdomen organ-by-organ and think quietly of the six-month-old baby for whom she has died. I think of the ecstasy and trials of parenthood and of all the milestones she will miss. I think of the pain of her family and the desperation with which they have clung to care. We always hope for recovery and for the miracles of modern science because love demands we must, but hers is an impossible case for which there is no hope and the only final mercy will be release from a body which is no more than a vessel, kept alive by the rhythmic hums and exhales of modern technology.

She died the Wednesday before Roe versus Wade was struck down by the supreme court.

Pregnancy is the ultimate stressor on the body, the ultimate litmus test of underlying predispositions for a young woman and the decision to terminate a pregnancy in order to preserve the life of the mother is rarely as black and white as any of us would like it to be. Life, death, and the risks inherent in pregnancy do not have a manual or any guarantee of success. 

There will be so many more women like her who will have sacrificed so many years of joy and laughter and life because their case was not abhorrent enough to justify an abortion, not emergent enough for a physician to put his license on the line. But where, exactly, is the cut off in any case? This woman was healthy enough to carry her pregnancy to term but her heart could not endure the influx of a large volume of blood from her uterus after delivery. Her pregnancy damaged her already-damaged heart to the point of failure.

I have so many other thoughts, mostly about how jarring and difficult pregnancy has been, how motherhood should never be forced, how much my body was destroyed by carrying my three very wanted children, and how I don't want any woman to have to do the things I do if she does not desire it with her entire heart. I feel terror at the thought of the gray corpse on the bed and all the others to come as the result of a decision made in zealotry instead of careful consideration; the easiest and simplest narrative winning out over the stunning nuance and delicacy of life, death, and appreciation for the intricacies of even the most basic medical care.

I feel hopeless and sad that more women and physicians who have made this their life's work were not included in the decision. But I also have hope that we are capable of change, that through passionate and devoted action, we can live in a more just society where female autonomy is prized above political gesturing and evangelical christianity holds less sway over those in power. It is so very, very hard to take a step backward.

Perhaps you are also feeling desperate and hopeless and set adrift in a sea of peril, mournful of the past and despondent for the future? Perhaps, then, this is the starting place, the place where we, like those who have come before, find ways to be more kind, caring, and compassionate to one another. There are so many mountains ahead of us and so many hearts that need convincing. I suspect that when you are in the starting place, things always feel insurmountable. But I have hope because you are out there and I am with you. I feel hopeful because hard things are easier together and because there are thousands of women and daughters who depend on our grit, resilience, and never ending pursuit of that more perfect union.