State lawmakers ‘don’t see the mourning and the grieving that these moms’ experience after getting a heartbreaking diagnosis, Breanna Cecil tells Kelly Rissman
A Tennessee woman who was denied an abortion despite a fatal abnormality says the state’s anti-abortion laws resulted in her losing an ovary, a fallopian tube and her hopes for a large family.
“The state of Tennessee took my fertility from me,” Breanna Cecil, 34, told The Independent. She added that state lawmakers “took away my opportunity to have a family like my own biological family because of these horrible laws that they put in place.”
The mother-of-one said she has not felt the same since her doctor told her in January 2023 that her fetus was diagnosed with acrania, a fatal condition where the fetus has no skull bones.
Then, 12 weeks pregnant, Ms Cecil was getting her first ultrasound. She attended the appointment alone, so when the doctor told her the fetus was not viable outside the womb, she was left with only asking the doctor what she should do.
However, she was left with few options. The state’s near-total abortion ban prevents anyone from getting an abortion if there is still a heartbeat - which her fetus still had.
The law makes no exceptions for fatal conditions and also criminalizes physicians who perform the procedure outside of the allowed exceptions.
She discovered the nonviability of the fetus in January 2023, and had an abortion in February.
The loss of her tube and ovary sounds like the abortion was not performed correctly.
Edit: looks like a whole bunch of people are mistaking what I meant. She should not have had to go to Chicago to get the healthcare she needed and, potentially, could have saved her own body.
Possibly it was due to the operation but the remedy was clear and she still had to wait. The longer the wait the greater the risk and the outcome likely would’ve been better if this was handled immediately. The point is that the law ignores medical best practices in the name of “saving lives” which, in a case like this, is no less than a form of torture for the hopeful parents.
Yes, absolutely. I didn’t mean to imply that the state of TN had no culpability in denying the medical care this woman needed. The story makes it sound like her health problems happened because her abortion was performed incorrectly, and while that is always a risk, had she not had to wait a month to get it her outcome might have been significantly better.
In any case, this is why women deserve the right to make decisions about their health and their body, independent of Conservative input.
The risk of infection rises as longer the dead tissue stays inside. The dead tissue being the retained pregnancy material.
Dilation and curettage is a blind procedure in which the the pregnancy is removed by suction. Most of the times some aprt does stay behind. Those are usually shed during menstruation.
Why not complete removal done?
Because a more vigorous curettage might cause uterus to rupture. So the doctors rely on bodies capacity to heal itself.