On a brilliant spring day, we sat in a window booth at the funky old Athenian Inn restaurant at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. I ordered an omelet. We stared at each other, emotions still reeling.
How else to begin this column? It’s not an easy subject, not easy at all. Others – politicians, pastors, protesters – seem much more able than I to stand up and say what they think.
I have never written about abortion. Even a year ago, when President Bush signed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act, I didn’t dare take up the topic in print. Too difficult, too divisive.
But on Monday, listening to news that 80-year-old Chief Justice William Rehnquist has cancer, I decided to try. I didn’t decide to say where I stand.
Do I even know precisely where I stand? Again, too hard. I’m bewildered at how the opinions of some can be so cut-and-dried.
Rehnquist was a dissenter on the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1973 Roe vs. Wade ruling, which established women’s legal right to abortion. Any possibility of a vacancy on the high court fuels speculation about the next president seeking to alter abortion rights through a judicial appointment.
For an issue so private, abortion has a very high political profile. But in private moments, the contentious public debate offers absolutely no help.
Back to that sunny morning in the restaurant in 1998, I can tell you that neither my husband nor I ever uttered the word abortion. It hung silently in the air between us as we tried to shake details of the procedure we had just heard about from a perinatal specialist at Swedish Medical Center.
On my own, I wouldn’t have gone to a session with a genetic counselor at the Seattle hospital. I was sent there by my family doctor in Everett, who wanted us to understand the risks of pregnancy at 44, and more importantly, the odds.
Those odds were not reassuring. We learned that the chance of conceiving a baby with a chromosomal problem rises from roughly one in 1,000 at age 30 to one in 100 at age 40. By 45, the age I was when my son was born, the risk of having a baby with Down syndrome is about 1 in 30.
I pictured those odds as one in a classroom full of kids. One in 30. Would you have liked those odds?
The wait for amniocentesis results, which tell whether a fetus has a genetic defect, would bring my pregnancy past a time when the simplest abortion procedure could be done.
I wouldn’t have had the needle test at all if my doctor hadn’t requested it. She reasoned that, regardless of our views on terminating a pregnancy, it’s prudent to know of problems before birth, so specialists can be available.
Why, with older children and a demanding job, was I pregnant at 44? I’ll invade my privacy enough to say that we’d hoped for a third child at 36, had given up that hope by about 40, and by 44 had quit worrying about it altogether.
By the time we were in that restaurant, avoiding scary odds and an unspeakable option, our big kids already were getting excited about a new baby. Thinking of a baby who might have special needs or severe medical problems, we had to weigh how that would change everything about our lives.
That sounds selfish, I know it does. I have a nephew with Down syndrome, a teenager who is both a challenge and a cherished gift for his family.
For me, abortion is wrong. But for me, choosing life has been easy. I have never been pregnant at 13. I have never been raped. I have never known incest. I have never known poverty.
What I experienced, a few months into my last pregnancy, was terrifying enough. It was a memorable lesson in what “between a woman and her doctor” truly means.
My worry was short-lived. By June 1998, I had received the call from Swedish Medical Center, which was followed by a letter. I still have it. Normal male fetus, it says.
Choice? I never really had to choose.
The loud debate over abortion is so polarized, so black and white. Rarely do we hear reasonable talk about that gray place in the middle, a place where many of us have been.
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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