::For Life

I feel like maybe I should put a Trigger Warning here. Trigger Warning due to infant loss and miscarriage.

I am going to write my feelings on this very controversial topic. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me but I hope that it might make people think. This is my experience through a pregnancy where I was offered an abortion multiple times.

In 2015 I ended up getting pregnant and was pretty excited for it. My husband and I was looking to buy a house and just get on with our lives as a family of 3. Everything seemed okay, I went to the doctor appointments as I was supposed to but decided to just wait for the halfway mark for our first ultrasound since that was the norm with having a midwife anyway. I just wanted to be as natural as possible.

Then everything changed. We went in for our ultrasound and after going over the baby the technician got very quiet. At one point she left the room and I can remember thinking, something is wrong. I had been through a “something is wrong” moment before 2 years prior when we suffered a miscarriage, so it may have been my mother’s intuition kicking in or something, but in the end I was right. Something was wrong. The baby’s heart wasn’t growing properly. They immediately got us in with a high risk OBGYN and we went to the hospital for more ultrasounds.

At the hospital we just got the gist of the bad news. Our baby’s heart wasn’t growing correctly, as I mentioned. We were offered the choice of abortion so that, if we wanted, we could try to have a different baby right away. The whole situation absolutely devastated us, but the offer blindsided us as well because it was a hospital with religious affiliation in the name. So the offer of an abortion was surprising. There was no way. We witnessed this baby moving on the monitor, heard the baby’s heartbeat; but most importantly, we loved this baby so much already. Life with or without this baby was not a choice for us to make.

I say “the baby” because my husband and I made the decision to not find out if any of our babies were boys or girls; so when our decisions were made, our baby was just our baby. No boy or girl identity. Just love and spirit.

Pregnancy made me feel sick, and so tired. Out of breath, and after the diagnosis I was heartbroken. I didn’t want my baby to have a hard life ahead of him or her. I felt so alone. My support system was lacking, I had no one but my husband it felt like. I was so scared that I would have to live without my baby.

The hospital had me coming in every week, pretty much. They were monitoring the baby’s heart. My husband had to work but I didn’t have to go through all of it alone. I had my baby. To and from the hospital I would just sing to my baby and I felt so bonded. There was talk of surgeries that they could do on hearts and a lot of people have had successes with it, so not all hope was lost.

More problems were added to the list, like kidney problems. After the birth there were so many problems on the board that I, the mother, can’t even remember all of them and would have to look. They don’t matter now, all that matters is the moments of bonding that I had with my little growing baby.

Throughout the pregnancy we were offered an abortion as if it was some sort of courtesy. It wasn’t appreciated by us. This little soul was meant to be cherished for as long as possible.

We will jump ahead now to the outcome of this pregnancy. We had to travel a couple of hours away to the Children’s Hospital so that the baby could be looked at to be decided if surgery could help. I got induced 4 days before the due date because it was around Christmas time. It was a long process but not lots of physical pain during the birthing process, I will make a different post about the whole thing someday since that is not really my point today. But I gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. He was 9 pounds 6 ounces and just looked like a big beautiful, perfect baby to me, and others too. People would comment on how surprising it was to have such a big healthy looking baby be in the NICU…and then later in a casket. I held him for maybe one minute. Then they had to take him away to give him oxygen. How devastating to be a new mom and have your baby taken away, being left with nothing but wonder and a breast pump.

I locked eyes with him in that minute and it was the last time I saw his eyes. After Christmas, when all of the doctors were back in from the holidays, they recommended that we don’t do any surgeries because he wouldn’t make it through. He had already had some heart surgery to get him to that point. So after 8 days of being in the NICU with him not conscious, we held our baby as the machines were taken off and he drifted away. His little broken heart broke our hearts but also made them swell with love at the same time.

Some parts I can go over and over in my head, wishing that somehow it could have been different. But I will never ever regret the 9 months that I got to bond and talk and sing with my baby boy. I knew his soul and he new mine. Part of me thinks that if I could have kept him in there forever, to be safe and warm, then I would have. But then I wouldn’t have my amazing kids now.

I love him so much. I truly feel blessed for the experience. I know I am a better person and mom for it. Just meeting him for a minute was worth it. I saw him and I knew what love was. I wanted nothing more than to help him get better so that he could stay with me. But that wasn’t possible. So now I live every day missing him but thanking God for the time that we had, singing in the car.

Thank you for reading.

::Vanilla.Ling.Ling.

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