This was a wanted child. I felt that if there was a decent chance that anything medical would help, I’d try it. But they were telling me that the child’s not going to live. To bring a child into the world who will have nothing but suffering to remember before it dies, I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t want this child used as an experiment. My husband and I talked about it. It wasn’t just a “women’s decision.” He’s Catholic and I’m Catholic. But he had no qualms with terminating the pregnancy.
I drove with my godmother to Wichita. When we arrived at the clinic, there were demonstrators all over the place. In order for the police to arrest these people, we had to sit in cars in front of the entrance in 109-degree heat. They remove one person at a time. The protesters do this thing called the “Wichita Baby Walk,” where they took these little itsy-bitsy baby steps to the police bus. As long as these people were moving, the police couldn’t pick them up and put them on the bus physically. It took one person 25, 30, 45 minutes depending on how good they were at doing this baby walk to get them to the bus. When you’re talking about 1,600 people, and taking the whole day to arrest 200, you start believing that you’re never going to get into the clinic.
While we sat there, the people would come up and hold these pictures of bloody child parts, screaming at you: “Don’t kill your babies. We’ll take them. We’ll adopt them.” One of the girls in the car was 13 years old. She hadn’t even known she was pregnant. She looked very, very scared. Finally I said: Let’s hold some shirts up to the window so she doesn’t have to look at this." She got a book out and I told her to read and not to look and she turned up the radio real loud. We joked around and tried to make her feel comfortable.
After a couple of hours, we went into another car. There were four girls packed in the back with a volunteer driver. One girl was a 19-year old, a college athlete, who was raped. She was talking to me through a stuffed animal. She appeared to have the mentality of a 13-year-old. She would say: “Hi, my name is such-and-such. What’s yours? And I’m Mr. Cow.” She was holding the stuffed animal like it was a buddy or a friend. She had to sit through this as well.
The crowd was massive. I felt like criminal of the worst kind, like I was hiding underneath a rock and just coming out when necessary to make these people get arrested. These people were blocking my right to do what was totally my choice, our free choice here in America. That incenses me.
The next day, I finally went in. The staff was kind and wonderful and supportive. I though they were unbelievably courageous. I feel like they are family. I told my doctors I didn’t want to have any memories of this. I wanted to be drugged up enough so that I didn’t have to remember. But I remember them saying, “Push, push,” and I remember something coming out. It was a stillbirth. At one point I guess I was inconsolable. There’s a lot I don’t remember. But I expressed a definite need to hold my baby, which I did. He looked just like my daughter. He had quite a lot of hair. He was real cute. I don’t know why I had to hold my baby. Maybe it was my way of saying good-bye.
If I had a choice, I would do it again. It makes me feel good to know that this child is at peace and is not being used as an experiment. But this is a thing that will stay with me the rest of my life. It’s affecting my daughter. It’s affecting my husband. If you have a child that’s going to die and you want it to die in peace, you want to have your suffering and then you want to let go. How can I ever let go of this?
