Ohio Bill Would Have Banned My Abortion
In 2013, I had an abortion.
I was using hormonal birth control, but one morning, I just wasn’t feeling right and pulled an expired pregnancy test out of the closet, fully expecting to be negative. It wasn’t.
My husband and I were barely surviving financially. I was just beginning my career and hadn’t been a full-time employee long enough to qualify for the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or maternity leave. But mostly, I knew I needed to leave my marriage.
When I visited my local abortion clinic a few days after my test, they diagnosed my pregnancy with an ultrasound and told me that I was almost eight weeks along. I opted to view the fetal heartbeat.
Then, after ending my pregnancy, I began the process of ending my broken marriage. I doubled down on my career and invested in my health. I secured a better job, got my life back on track, and married a brilliant, kind, and supportive man who makes me feel safe and secure. I am the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been, and I credit this shift in my life to the fact that I was able to terminate a pregnancy that would have made it impossible to fully extricate myself from an unhealthy relationship.
On Tuesday, the Ohio legislature passed a bill that would prevent women in my situation from having abortions. The bill, which anti-abortion legislators tucked into a bipartisan bill that updated laws around child abuse reporting, bans all abortions after the point at which a fetal heartbeat can be detected - as early as six weeks for some patients. The bill passed just hours after it was amended, with no opportunity for public hearings or testimony. And while it does allow abortions in rare situations that threaten the health of the pregnant person, the majority of people seeking treatment from abortion providers will be turned away, including survivors of rape and incest, and those needing abortions due to fetal health anomalies. Now the bill is headed to the desk of Gov. John Kasich, who has overseen the shutdown of half the clinics in our state.
While critics might say abortion will still be legal in Ohio, I’d respond by quoting Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver, “Abortion cannot just be theoretically legal – it has to be literally accessible.” This bill effectively bans abortion in the state because most people don’t know they’re pregnant at six weeks. I didn’t. How can you get health care if you don’t know you need it?
And the courts have agreed. North Dakota and Arkansas have both passed heartbeat bills, and in both cases, federal courts struck them down as unconstitutional. The Supreme Court refused to hear appeals in these cases. So Ohio’s effort is not only abhorrent, it is also a waste of my taxes as this law would surely be litigated and is unlikely to withstand a challenge.
All too often, conversations about abortion are focused on politics, and people don’t hear the voices that really matter: those of us who have actually had abortions. If the politicians who passed this bill wanted to understand what they were doing to people in Ohio, they would have held public hearings and listened to stories like mine. Instead, they tried to slip the legislation into an unrelated bill that had widespread support.
Four years after my abortion, I’m once again thinking about what it means for women, and families, to have a choice when it comes to their reproductive health. My husband and I very much want to start a family, and for the past several months, I’ve been trying to get pregnant. But from the beginning, we’ve been aware of the risks associated with our families’ complex medical histories. Our doctors have been up-front about the need for prenatal DNA screenings and early genetic testing when I do become pregnant. We both know that we may need to make the decision to terminate a pregnancy based on those test results. For us, that decision would be one of compassion and love for our child, and deciding to have an abortion would mean protecting that child from a lifetime of pain and suffering. Ohio’s proposed abortion ban would take that choice away from my family. If our doctors tell us that our baby has no chance of survival after birth, or that its heart and lungs will never work properly, we will be forced to watch helplessly as our baby endures endless pain and fights to survive.
Most people would agree that telling others you’re trying to conceive is a bad idea, and sharing it in an article for strangers to read is an even worse idea. (I fully expect my mother to ask if I’m pregnant yet at least three times every day after she reads this article.) And in fact, I’d really rather not make this part of my life so public. But having already had one pregnancy detected only after there was a heartbeat and knowing the risks associated with a future one, it feels like the only way to make my voice heard to my legislators. If they even care about hearing it.
Malloryis an abortion storyteller withWe Testify, a program of the National Network of Abortion Funds, a board member at NARAL Pro-Choice America, and a native Ohioan.
Follow Mallory on Twitter.
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