6 Years Ago: The Consents I had to Sign to Get My Abortion

I wrote yesterday about what it was like to go into a routine anatomy scan for a very wanted pregnancy, and instead of getting a quintessential ultrasound picture… instead receiving the news that the pregnancy isn’t viable. Yesterday marked the 6 year anniversary of having that exact experience.

Immediately after learning this devastating news, I also learned that the state of Missouri had a set of legally mandated hurdles that I’d have to clear in order to have an abortion to terminate the pregnancy and spare my daughter a brief, agonizing life upon birth if she made it that far.

Today marks the 6 year anniversary of when my husband and I had to clear our schedules (still processing and sharing the information we’d received the day prior) to go into Planned Parenthood at 10 am to review and sign legally required abortion consents.

We were brought back to a conference room, where we were met by Dr. Caitlin Bernard, the physician made famous over the past several months for providing an abortion for a pregnant 10-year-old rape victim. State laws at the time mandated that a doctor had to walk us through the consents, despite them not being medical in nature, and I remember thinking that she surely had more important, specialized things she should have been doing. Why were they wasting her time like this?

She immediately prepared us for how hard what we were going to do would be. She said ‘the forms I’m about to go over with you aren’t medical, and they’re designed to make you feel bad. But that’s not how we feel about you.” I braced, but it didn’t sufficiently prepare me for what was coming.

The consents (which you can see below) asked if I had been given a chance to hear my daughter’s heartbeat, or see an ultrasound of her, as if I hadn’t listened to her heartbeat at home on a home doppler, or hadn’t had nearly three hours of ultrasounds the day prior in order to diagnose her with her fetal condition.

They told me about the overblown medical risks of abortion, but not of pregnancy or childbirth, which are particularly bad for Black people who are three-to-four times as likely to die in childbirth in Missouri. They gave me alternatives for abortion but didn’t talk about what Grace’s experience would be like upon birth or the risks to my health by continuing the pregnancy. I felt misunderstood, judged, and frustrated.

Then the consents required that I be given an Informed Consent packet, which started off with:

I was furious and heartbroken. How could the state where I have lived all my life, where I work and pay taxes and vote in every election be so willfully spreading propaganda when I was trying to attempt medical care? Not only was I aware that the idea that human life starts at conception is based on religion, not medical science, but it wasn’t even helpful: I had received the worst news I could fathom about my pregnancy. When the state legislators thought life began (or not) was irrelevant. I had a medical issue I needed to address regardless of their opinions.

I was incensed. What about the separation of church and state? What about my circumstances? If they misunderstood or dismissed mine, surely no one deserved this treatment. Dr. Bernard calmly and tenderly reassured me that I didn’t have to read the packet any further and that I could throw it away like the garbage it was, but I was furious for her that she had to ignore her medical training and provide such biased information to me because of a law clearly designed to demean and judge me.

But I signed the consent saying I had received it. I had to - I couldn’t get my abortion without doing so. But the light of my fury had been ignited, and it would go on to form who I am today, and why I am writing now. The contrast between the calm, comforting and competent care that Dr. Bernard gave me in comparison to how tone-deaf and callous the consents were was further radicalizing. I fully understood that the hoops I had to jump through to get my abortion were all about controlling and shaming me, not in any way about ensuring I received safe medical care.

And I’m a white upper-middle-class woman whose privilege has so often made me immune to this sort of interference. I realized how lucky I was to be able to get my abortion at all: at the time there was one abortion clinic left in Missouri, and I lived near it. I had a good job with health insurance and was able to take off at the last second to sign these awful consents. I had been able to get my emergency follow-up scan the day prior the same day as my anatomy scan and hadn’t had to drive hours to get to the appointment or the site to sign the consents. I had the financial means to cover the significant costs associated with the abortion. I didn’t have to find childcare or transportation or risk losing my job by taking off. The realization of these abortion requirements’ impact started settling into my consciousness. I realized what people meant when they said that abortion bans were all about control: they made the process so onerous, I could see how it would be nearly impossible for many people to do it.

This was six years ago. Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land. I started to understand why people said it was the floor, not the ceiling. If Missouri could still legally enact these hurdles, was abortion access even a reality?

This is a reason that I believed correctly that Roe would fall. I had already seen how transparent conservatives were in their desire to control and punish pregnant people firsthand. Banning abortion entirely was an easy choice for them once it was legally available after the fall of Roe.

And please believe me now when I say: they’re just getting started. Organizers here in Missouri fully expect that even more punitive laws will be filed and ultimately pass the next legislative session (which runs from January to May of 2023).