Never ‘Pro-Abortion,’ but Once, Sadly, in Need of One

Her name is Ellen, and it’s not as though she has ever forgotten about what happened 11 years ago. But as she followed the congressional debate recently over late-term abortions, the memories came back more vividly than usual. Heavily laden with sadness and anger, they aren’t memories of the pleasant kind.

Ellen was already a strong abortion-rights supporter in 1985 when, at 40, she became pregnant with her second child. She and her husband, Mike, a construction worker, were surprised but delighted that their 7-year-old daughter would have a sibling. Ellen told Mike over a romantic dinner, and they started talking about names on the way home.

Initially leery about her being pregnant at 40, they relaxed as Ellen’s pregnancy unfolded smoothly--even better than her first. Nor did warning bells go off when Ellen’s doctor told her after six or eight weeks that the fetus seemed smaller than normal and wondered if she had miscalculated the conception date.

At 16 weeks, Ellen went in for amniocentesis, the procedure that reveals gender and any chromosomal abnormalities. A few weeks later, Ellen was at her law office when she took the call that, she says, changed her life.

Thinking she was about to get happy news about gender, she remembers the voice on the other end saying, instead, “Ellen, we did find something.” She remembers something about a “major” problem or “severe” problem and that she needed to come over to the UCI Medical Center as soon as she could. “It suddenly hit me what was going on,” Ellen says.

They told her that one of the chromosomes had a marker that indicated a severe birth defect. Their scenarios: the pregnancy might not go full term, the baby might be stillborn, that it probably wouldn’t survive 48 hours if born alive or, if it survived, it would require permanent institutionalization.

“They left no room for doubt,” she says. “They were almost matter of fact that this was not a viable pregnancy.”

For Ellen and Mike, it was a quick but painful decision. Already five months into her pregnancy, Ellen opted for abortion. Within days, she was at a clinic that performed them and which was also a site of frequent anti-abortion pickets.

Ellen remembers arriving for the abortion early on a Saturday morning and seeing a woman carrying a banner with the likeness of the Virgin Mary. “She screamed at me, ‘Don’t kill your baby! Love your baby!’ ” Ellen says. “She said something like, ‘We’ll adopt your baby.’ ”

Until then, Ellen had talked about abortion in abstract terms. Now, she was the target of angry pickets. “It was very intellectual before. Now it became very personal. It was awful. I couldn’t believe that someone was standing there, screaming at me like that.”

Too distraught by everything, she didn’t react. “Later, I was furious about it. At the time, I was just too upset. There was just a sadness, because we really wanted this baby. I don’t feel I did anything wrong or immoral.”

Memories of that day, regenerated by this month’s congressional passage of a bill banning a controversial late-term abortion procedure, have stoked Ellen’s anger. President Clinton’s veto buoyed her, but the abortion debate infuriates her.

“It’s the fact that somebody thinks they have the right to tell you how to think and feel and force you to behave the way they think they should,” she says. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t had this choice.”

I suggest that abortion opponents would contend she did a horrible thing. “Well, it is horrible,” she says. “It’s a horrible thing to do. It is something living, but I don’t think you can judge other people’s motives.”

She is particularly incensed by the fact that it is largely men who make abortion law. “It just seemed to me so cruel that these men thought they had the right to tell women they couldn’t have late-term abortions because they didn’t think it was the proper thing to do.”

Over the years, Ellen hasn’t told many people about her abortion. She doesn’t care if people know, and only requested that I not use her last name for fear of reprisals by phone or at her home.

As she and her husband laid out their story this week in their Huntington Beach home, I was struck by the talk of people being “pro-abortion.” After all these years and after assuring me she could discuss the situation unemotionally, Ellen temporarily choked back emotion as she recalled the phone call telling her of the prognosis.

“You have all these plans, and then they’re all dashed,” she says.

To this day, Ellen and Mike haven’t told their daughter, now 18, about the abortion.

So, you have one daughter? I said, preparing to leave.

“We have an 18-year-old and a 9-year-old.”

A 9-year-old? I ask.

“I got pregnant a year later. Oh, I didn’t tell you that part? I’m sorry,” she says, laughing. “Yeah, almost exactly a year later.”

This time, she wasn’t blase while awaiting amniocentesis results.

“They called me at the office again and said everything was fine. I remember asking if it was a boy or a girl, and they said, ‘Do you really want to know?’ I said, ‘Sure, I want to know.’ They told me it was a girl. So, yeah, very happy ending. Beautiful, wonderful daughter.”

Dana Parsons’ columns appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.