Many years ago, my Mom was 9 months pregnant, walking into the hospital to be induced. It was a sunny day, and my brother, then 3, was holding her hand as she and my aunt walked to the door. It should have been a routine afternoon, with mom checking in, changing into a gown, being anesthetized (they did that in those days), and waking up to a new little girl.
But that’s not what happened.
Before they reached the door, the placenta tore away from the uterine lining, creating an immense pool of blood in the parking lot as she went into shock, fell to the ground, and died.
Removing the baby, quickly, and resuscitating her was the only way to save her life, and is the only reason my younger brother and I exist.
That life-saving medical procedure was a late-term abortion. It is still classified as such, today. It was the very boogey-man the right wing points to as the horrible thing “the left” wants. It was “abortion right up until birth!!!!”
My 3 year old brother had been taken home by another relative while Mom was being rescued. When asked if he wanted to visit her later that day, he said:
"No. When mommies break, babies cry."
The baby did not survive. My parents named her Mary, after my grandmother.
Regardless of what happened during the critical emergency, the doctor *had* to say the baby hadn't taken a breath (classifying it as a "stillbirth") on the death certificate, in order to retain his medical license, and avoid potentially being brought up on murder charges. Mary could not possibly have survived more than a few moments under the extreme circumstances, but regardless of whether or not she was alive at the moment she was removed from my mother’s body, the doctor HAD to say she wasn't breathing for the sake of his own career, his own life, his own family. The courts at the time were not kind to life-saving medical professionals that the right wing extremists choose to call “baby murderers,” in order to keep their followers rage-blinded and lizard-brained.
The nurse told my parents the baby had taken a breath. She swore an affidavit to that effect, for them to bring to their priest, but the church would only accept the doctor's word. The doctor, for legal reasons, could not say she had taken so much as a single breath.
After appealing all the way to the Pope (via a Monseigneur in the family), my parents, afraid for Mary’s soul, had to bribe a local priest to bury her in consecrated ground ... in the weeds in the far back of the cemetery, between the freeway and railroad tracks.
They had to buy 6 plots in the weeds ... to be able to bury their daughter.
Under the proposed MI ban, and others like it queued up in State Houses all across the country, it will be illegal, again, to save a woman's life under the same circumstances.
If the radicals get their way, when mommies break, mommies will die. They will stay dead, and their existing families will be devastated.