If the Stupid Amendment (yes, I insist on calling it that) had been the law in 1991, I would have died from a cornual pregnancy because I wouldn't have been able to prove with certainty that I would die without an abortion. I wrote a diary about my situation last year in response to John McCain's air quotes around the "health" of the mother during one of the debates, here.
Here is the relevant part of the diary:
You've heard of an ectopic pregnancy? Where the egg implants itself in the fallopian tube? In my case, it blew up and required major emergency surgery. It turned out that scar tissue caused this.
I became pregnant a few months later, and my doctor said, well, I think you have a cornual pregnancy. What is that, I said. She (!) said, your uterus is shaped like a triangle, with the fallopian tubes entering from the top corners. An cornual pregnancy is when the egg implants itself near the fallopian tube corners. If it grows there, it will explode your uterus, and you die immediately.
I said, what should I do? She said, oh, wait a couple of weeks so we can see it on the sonogram. I said, what's the risk I could die? She said (being the right to lifer, I found out later) just trust in god that you will be OK. I said, I want to live. She said, stop crying in my office. I said, I want a D&C RIGHT NOW. She backed off and said ok. The nurses in the hospital were horrified when I told them this.
Afterwards, the doctor called my husband and admitted that I needed the operation. She never admitted this to me. This happened in 1991. What could have happened here if abortions were illegal?
This idiotic amendment allows women to have coverage for abortions in the health exchange only if they can prove they could die without it. I couldn't prove this for sure, of course, and my doctor would never have supported it. Therefore, I would have died.
I've read the other diaries from women with equally horrific stories. This amendment cannot be allowed to stand. My beautiful daughters, who are now young women, should never face the chance of something like this happening to them.
Updated: The key point here is that if I had been faced with the same situation with this amendment in effect, I probably would have waited the two weeks to find out whether the pregnancy was cornual (since the uninsured cost of this surgery was near $10,000 - it was more than a simple abortion). In two weeks, as the doctor admitted, this pregnancy would have exploded in my uterus, killing me. It's not just about a choice, it's about reasonable access to normal health care for women.