I realized, while attempting to answer
Gianna Jessen's question about what her rights should have been when her mother had a saline abortion, that in a way, I'm her opposite -- yet we're also similar. I think that's why her story is compelling to me.
Both of our mothers got pregnant at a time when the best birth control was the Pill, and IUDs still hadn't been perfected. We both suffered birth trauma that caused doctors to predict we would be both intellectually and physically disabled (I was far luckier physically, but Gianna explains herself pretty well about the silver lining she sees in her cerebral palsy). We can even both laugh at the same dead-on Donald Trump parodies.
But instead of my mother trying to kill me, the situation was reversed. While obstetrics has improved enough that vasa previa and marginal placenta previa can be detected by ultrasound, they didn't catch it until the pressure of my head caused her water to break (which is generally when things go wrong in those cases). Fortunately she was already at the hospital, or the placenta tearing at the same time as the unshielded umbilical cord junction rupturing would likely have killed both of us -- she could have bled out in 10 minutes, and me sooner. We both still required blood transfusions. Essentially, I tried to kill her. (Sorry, Mom!)
The reason I am alive is because Mom was asked, on the way to the OR for her emergency Cesarean, which life she wanted them to save first. She chose mine. Had she chosen differently, I wouldn't be here... but it was, and should have been, her choice.
I remember my mother telling me the story of my birth from the time I was little. (My father told his own version, because men weren't routinely in the delivery room in 1980). She told both my older sister and I that even if abortion wasn't legal back when my sister was conceived, she still could have gotten one -- but it was her choice, and she chose us both times. While she never said it directly, I recognized that she chose me not just once, but twice. Even she admitted that telling them to prioritize my life might have not been the most logical decision, since had things gone wrong it would have left my sister motherless before her 10th birthday, but it was her gut answer and she had no regrets.
Because of this, I can't see my own life as an entitlement. Instead, I feel enormous gratitude for the gift of life -- given to me not just by God, but also by my mother. Gianna feels compelled to speak for the babies who can't talk because they're dead. Similarly, I feel compelled to speak for the women who weren't as lucky as my mother, and for kids who weren't as lucky as my nine-year-old sister -- who deserved to have her mother alive to raise her.
Sadly, even the best medical science can't yet save babies born in the middle of the second trimester or earlier. Catholic hospitals, which increasingly are becoming the only facilities in many rural areas of the country, recognize that sometimes the only patient they can save is the mother. But if there's a heartbeat they will not do anything to accelerate the miscarriage, even if the mother's life is in severe jeopardy and they can't be "stabilized" for transfer to a non-religious hospital, without placing the uneducated opinions of non-medical professionals higher in the decision-making process than the woman and her doctor.
In one horrific case, the physician on call (who obviously would much rather have delivered a live baby and tried to save it, even if it didn't survive after delivery) when a woman who presented at 19 weeks with an inevitable miscarriage (admitted earlier by another physician) went septic decided to bypass the ethics committee, because they had still refused to induce labor to accelerate the miscarriage so the infection could be properly treated. He took matters into his own lands, literally -- by snapping the umbilical cord during a manual exam. The heartbeat stopped, and then he could deliver her. She was already on antibiotics, pressors, and cooling blankets before he intervened, but they were not working. He felt that if he wasted any more time, she would have died as well. She still was in ICU for ten days afterwards, with complications of disseminated intravascular coagulation. She was very lucky to be alive -- and with further delay, she very easily could have died. The physician resigned afterwards, because he couldn't do something like that again.
The issues of informed consent matter a great deal to me, but many physicians in Catholic hospitals believe they would be risking their jobs to directly state the policies of the hospital and the risks associated with not immediately delivering the baby in these hopeless cases. Yet doctors are then sued when their refusal to recommend induction of labor leads to preventable complications, because the standard of care for inevitable miscarriage before 20 weeks is to at least offer evacuation of the uterus. They are truly caught between a rock and a hard place. And when I see arguments to not treat a confirmed ectopic pregnancy until tubal rupture actually occurs because ectopic pregnancy is "far from unquestionably fatal", it makes me so angry I could chew iron and spit nails. Even Catholic hospitals will treat a tubal pregnancy by sacrificing the tube, though the standard of care for an unruptured ectopic pregnancy is methotrexate. (Ironically, that's one way to get sterilized and remain a "good Catholic" -- have two ectopic pregnancies.)
Before blood transfusions became available, sometimes it became obvious that the mother would die in a difficult birth, and usually by that point the mother was unconscious (so unable to give consent). The justification for the use of Cesarean delivery prior to any reasonable expectation for the mother to survive the operation was that it could save the only life that could be saved. Delaying it after maternal death was a certainty and she was unconscious until her heartbeat stopped would have presented a totally unacceptable risk to the baby's brain, if not its life. Now, the situation is reversed. Until we can transplant babies into artificial wombs, delaying treatment of confirmed ectopic pregnancy or inevitable miscarriage prior to 20 weeks (unless the mother gives truly informed consent to expectant management) presents a totally unacceptable risk to the mother's health in comparison with the chance for a good outcome, and most interventions in the case of a nearly-viable baby do not kill the child directly -- so the babies may still have a chance as medical science gets better.
The same arguments come up, to my mind, when people suggest that the fact non-barrier birth control methods may sometimes interfere with the implantation of a newly fertilized egg means they cause "mini-abortions", and so shouldn't be available. This also comes up in discussions of "personhood" for fertilized eggs. A huge factor in the reduction of both maternal and infant mortality in this country compared to 100 years ago (along with antibiotics) has been that relatively few women choose to spend more of their reproductive years pregnant or nursing than not anymore. Babies do better when their mothers space out their pregnancies, and mothers are far less likely to experience severe mental health problems related to pregnancy if they give their bodies and brains time to recover between births. (In my own family, my grandfather's sister was admitted to the "State Hospital for Nervous Diseases" after having several "stairstep" children and then becoming psychotic -- she never left.) Many complications are more common in grand multiparas, and the risk increases with each pregnancy. This is aside from individual health concerns, many of which still significantly affect/are affected by pregnancy despite medical advances.
However, there are many reasons why women feel the need to be able to use effective contraception that they can use themselves, without the cooperation of their partner being needed, that aren't entirely about their own health. For instance, their spouse might be the one allergic to the latex or spermicide used in condoms or diaphragms. They could also want to have children in the future, but know the time isn't right, and want to use a method with a higher effectiveness than condoms.
While condoms are our only protection against sexually transmitted diseases aside from abstinence, one in six married couples using condoms alone will experience an unplanned pregnancy. There is far better contraception available -- the newest arm implants are statistically more effective than sterilization (doctors botch sterilization surgeries more often than the implant fails), and the non-hormonal IUD still reduces user error enough to be 20 times more effective than condoms (ten times more effective than oral contraceptives). More effective birth control means fewer unplanned pregnancies, fewer abortions, and fewer women suffering life-threatening complications of pregnancy.
They also might not have a spouse/partner who is willing to cooperate with them in the use of barrier birth control methods. Since historically women were obligated to have sex with their husbands, and even today some people argue a woman gives her consent to sexual intercourse by getting married, it's not just "sluts" who need highly effective reversible contraception their partner can't sabotage. We have come too far from the days when women were prisoners of their bodies to go back to that because some people deny a woman can become pregnant against her will. (Guys, science is working on the same for you, I promise, but you have a lot of swimmers compared to our one egg!)
Even if life begins at conception, pregnancy only becomes established at implantation. Until the hatched blastocyst implants into the uterine lining, a woman doesn't know if she's conceived. When the little being latches on successfully, human chorionic gonadotropin is produced, and that's what makes the stick turns positive. At least three fertilized eggs fail at this process for every one that succeeds, no matter what the woman might try to do to prevent it. So if every fertilized egg is ensouled at the moment of conception, there are at least three baby souls in Heaven for every person that was ever born, aborted, or miscarried (and healthy identical twins can result from a split that occurs shortly after implantation -- but omniscience probably helps, if we're debating the nature of the soul). Many of these little beings can never become people because essentially a "typo" of some sort was made in the gamete transcription process -- and a working genetic code is important for early cell divisions in mammals. Less severe errors result in babies being born with disabilities ranging from Down Syndrome (which has an excellent survival rate now thanks to infant heart surgery advances) to triploidy (the only known survivor past age five with a non-mosaic form being Sabrina Lynn Cox), but sadly most make it impossible for the little being to ever become a person.
If the baby lived long enough to start implantation, often a woman experiences a "chemical pregnancy" when the baby dies -- others experience "blighted ovum" when the baby implants successfully but never develops. There is about a 15% spontaneous miscarriage rate among confirmed pregnancies, most in the first trimester, and many of the babies that die so early have chromosomal abnormalities. So while implantation is no guarantee of survival, it is certainly the line where survival chances increase dramatically. Since science has yet to invent a highly effective reversible birth control method that doesn't potentially adversely affect the uterine lining, I feel the principle of double effect applies to non-barrier contraception (both routine and emergency use). And obviously, since women do still get pregnant on the Pill, a less hospitable uterine lining is not an absolute barrier to implantation.
The overwhelming majority of people in the United States, including pregnant women seeking abortion, do not approve of elective late-term abortion procedures in viable pregnancies done in ways that don't give the baby a good chance at life. Certainly no one sane agrees with infanticide. Similarly, the overwhelming majority of people agree that hormonal contraception does more good than harm, and no one sane wants to see two lives lost if only one could have been saved in the first place. It may not be a lot of common ground, but it's a start.
But no, I don't think I had a "right to life" when that life came at the expense of my mother's health. Not when that life could have stolen her from my sister, who was already here and deserved to have her mother there to teach her how to be a woman, to see her off to prom, to watch her get married. Only the individual woman knows her life situation well enough to decide if rolling the dice by continuing a pregnancy is worth the risk, because even sterilization has been known to fail, and my mother's pregnancy wasn't considered high-risk. The only person capable of assisting her with that decision, by giving her the most accurate information about all her options and the risks of each, is her treating physician.
It's even more astounding to me that we actually give dead people more respect for their bodily autonomy than the "right to life" movement proposes to give pregnant women, yet they call women who don't want to risk their health and lives selfish. On that note, shameless plug here -- donating bone marrow is now almost as easy as donating blood, and kids are dying waiting for their match! If you're between 18 and 44, please consider joining the National Marrow Donor Registry. I won't say you should be legally required to do it, or to make sure your consent is on file for your organs to be donated after death, or make an appointment at your local blood bank if you're eligible to donate and it's been 56 days since your last donation... but all of those are a great deal easier than carrying a baby and giving birth. And even men can do them!
The very fact you can say no, however, shows that we do not live in a culture that sees the "right to life" as being absolute. It doesn't trump a person's right to control what happens to their body (which is one of the many reasons why one may use deadly force to stop a rape in progress -- otherwise the moral response to rape really should be to "close your eyes and think of England" until you think you are about to die, since rape is also "far from unquestionably fatal"). Kids with cancer aren't any less innocent than unborn children, but not even parents can be forced to donate organs, blood, or marrow against their will. One would hope any good parent would, but refusing isn't against the law. Perfectly good organs rotting in graves with 21 people dying every day waiting for transplants is obscene to me, but even that level of selfishness, waste, and disrespect for the sanctity of life in the name of bodily autonomy and personal freedom is Constitutionally protected. How can pregnancy and all it entails be a less onerous burden to force upon women in the name of the "right to life" than donating organs is after death?
We acknowledge this truth when we refer to "giving birth". When people say that carrying a pregnancy to term is an obligation, suggest babies have the "right" to maim their mothers even though only a miracle will save them, or even go so far as to say that concerns about women dying are "spurious", despite our maternal mortality rate rising since when I was born in 1980 -- that's right, it was safer giving birth when my mother nearly died than it is now! -- their words are a slap in the face to mothers everywhere daily who choose to risk their own lives to give the gift of life to their children. They do so not out of legal obligation or a desire to avoid prosecution, but out of selfless love. It's an insult to my mother's sacrifice to suggest it should be any other way. She did far more than just her "duty".
Life is a gift. Not an entitlement.
Now go thank your mother, if you're lucky enough to still have her here, even if she didn't give birth to you. The woman who holds that place in your heart, regardless of whether she was the one to carry you within her body or not, was on the job far longer than just a few months.