Thirty years ago, when my mother was pregnant, an ultrasound revealed troubling abnormalities: The fetus’s organs were misaligned. This condition, she was told by her doctor, correlated with a wide range of disabilities that could cause the baby to die at birth. The doctor told my mother that she could request an abortion. She wanted her to know her options.
My parents had good health insurance, a steady income, and a strong support system. They chose to continue with the pregnancy. A few months later, I was born into a crowd of doctors waiting to assess and treat my condition. I had my first of many major surgeries when I was 8 weeks old. My parents went to sleep every night and prayed that I would experience another birthday.
Two liver transplants and countless other life-saving surgeries later, I am now a 29-year-old woman sitting squarely in my own reproductive window. But with the recent Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to legal abortion, it’s clear that I won’t have the same freedom to make choices about my own body as my mother had.
Despite the fact that abortion opponents would defend my disabled “life” in my mother’s womb, the laws they’ve enacted across the country are now endangering my life and the lives of other disabled and chronically ill people by potentially making us force a pregnancy to end, even in the face of serious health consequences.
Those of us who are disabled and pro-choice, like me, often face confusion and contradiction. This is a difficult conversation. Arguing for choice is not advocating the termination of disabled fetuses; if so, I wouldn’t be pro-choice.
Opponents of abortion like to use disabled fetuses as pawns to support their politics. To be honest, sometimes it works for me. I deeply regret that the value of people with disabilities is often overlooked or ignored. But I know that this inner conflict was manufactured and sold to me, not me.
By evoking a story about valuing disability, opponents of abortion may associate abortion with the shady practice of eugenics, or the systematic removal of unsavory traits in a population to achieve genetic supremacy. If they can like terminating a pregnancy for a fetal abnormality up to genocide, they can compare their advocacy to protecting people with disabilities. However, they forget that pregnancy can put people with disabilities at risk. Removing access to abortion does not protect our lives; it puts them in danger.
Growing up in a conservative city, I became familiar with this storyline: “No one should have an abortion, even if there is something wrong with their baby,” my high school friend would say. “Kendall, you’re a miracle baby. I’m sure you’re glad you’re still alive.” I was already firmly pro-choice then, but my disability was used as evidence in her argument, the gotcha in our debate.
What my friend didn’t understand was that disabled fetuses grow up to be disabled people with their own reproductive needs. In some cases, these needs include access to abortion. It is the key to our health care – as essential to our well-being as mobility aids, surgery and medicine.
Take my case: Pregnancy in organ transplant recipients like me is a high risk business. Should I choose to conceive one day, my pregnancy must be carefully considered and closely monitored. Many transplant recipients and a host of others with chronic health conditions are taking drugs that have irreversible and negative effects on a fetus, and in the case of an unplanned pregnancy, they should have access to abortion. Pregnancy can also pose a threat to our transplanted organs.
Even in anti-abortion states where abortion is still legal in the event of a life-threatening situation, what is life-threatening is limited. Cancer probably isn’t menacing enough to justify a termination of pregnancy. Bleeding can be, but doctors and hospitals will have to make that call in real time by consulting their lawyers. Then there’s the cruel truth that people with disabilities know better than most: Your health can be harmed in life-changing ways without what doctors call imminent death.
Disabled people have been around for a long time sexually childish, opening the door for paternalism to rough up our bodies and lives. We are more than three times as likely to be victims of sexual assault and rape as our non-disabled peers. The same movement that has fought throughout history to block access to abortion has attempted to control and abuse disabled pregnant people and parents by engaging in state-sanctioned eugenics.
In the case of 1927 Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court authorized states to sterilize those held in public institutions. At the center of the case was a woman who had been raped and became pregnant. She was committed to an institution, where she was forced to give up her baby, and then she became the center of a nascent eugenics movement that sought to sterilize disability, poverty and color from American society.
Control over the reproduction of the disabled still exists. Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in an opinion from 2007 before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, affirmed the government’s interest in coercing two disabled people into abortions, saying that “accepting the wishes of patients who lack (and have always had) the mental capacity to receive medical making decisions are not logical and would lead to wrong medical decisions.” In June, he made a total moral turnaround as one of five Supreme Court justices to overthrow our individual freedoms by revoking our constitutional right to abortion.
The loss of access to legal abortion has completely changed the decision-making process to have children. It has increased both the danger of getting pregnant and my anxiety. It is deeply ironic that the people who swore they fought for my right to exist are now threatening my right to thrive and survive. The hypocrisy is furious.
These actions are not about respecting the sanctity of our lives. It’s about controlling them. What chronically ill and disabled people need is autonomy to make the care choices that suit them. It’s what we all deserve.