Liberal Forum

Commentary: Indiana's new abortion law won't save babies. It will only make my patients suffer.

Even after years of education, training and experience as an obstetrician/gynecologist, I am never prepared to deliver the news that a pregnancy is abnormal. There is no good way to tell a pregnant woman - a woman who may already be wearing maternity clothes, thinking about names and decorating the nursery - that we have identified a fetal anomaly that can lead to significant, lifelong disability or even her baby's death.

In such situations, physicians have two responsibilities. First, we must always be supportive of the mother or family who has suddenly been confronted with the loss of an imagined ideal pregnancy and child. And second, we help them understand that they have options, one of which is the termination of the pregnancy.

Unfortunately, that's no longer the case in Indiana, where a new law signed by Gov. Mike Pence (R), punishes doctors if they perform abortions for women because of their fetus' race or sex, or after a diagnosis of disability. Indiana's state government is intruding on the doctor-patient relationship at one of its most vulnerable, sensitive times. Which means that not only does the new law encroach on women's rights to control their own reproduction, it is also bad medicine.

As a mother as well as a doctor, I am acutely aware of the intensity and fear of the unknown inherent in pregnancy and childbirth. Indiana now expects women who live here to experience them without trusting their doctors' knowledge and with strict limits on how doctors may treat patients - limits driven not by science or research, but by politics.

Supporters of the new law, such as Pence, say the measure "affirms the value of all human life." And yes, some women do choose to carry abnormal pregnancies to term. I am honored to care for them and their babies. I have held and comforted babies as they died, because their mothers were too grief-stricken to bear it. I have cried with families as we watched their babies breathe their last breath.

Not every woman can handle such horror. In the United States, abortion is an ethical, safe, appropriate and - with the exception of North Dakota and Indiana - legal medical option in the case of severe anomalies, one that spares women the emotional pain of stillbirth or the loss of an infant. That loss is dismissed and diminished by this law and by those who support it; the law doesn't save babies, it just forces a horrific fate onto both mother and child. It includes an exception only for termination of babies who would die within three months of being born, as if three months is enough time to justify forcing all women to take on the risks of carrying a pregnancy to term and delivering a baby, only to watch it die.

And that exception would still require women to carry to term pregnancies with some severe and disastrous genetic abnormalities, all of which I've seen in women who chose to have abortions rather than deliver babies who suffer from them.

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