Just eight weeks before the midterm elections, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., introduced a bill that would ban abortion after 15 weeks in most cases. With Democrats in control of Congress, the bill has little chance of passing and may have even given voters more incentive to turn out in November.
Straight Arrow News contributor Jordan Reid refers to American model Chrissy Teigen’s story to highlight the risks such a law would pose to women who find themselves with compromised pregnancies:
What do Lindsey Graham and Chrissy Teigen have in common? Very, very little – except they’re both on my mind today. Chrissy Teigen recently came under unsurprising, but still wildly demoralizing, online fire because she “came out” as saying that what she underwent when she tragically lost her child two years ago was not, as she initially believed, a miscarriage, but rather an abortion, to “save her life for a baby that had absolutely no chance.”
Where does Lindsey Graham factor into this? He recently introduced a bill prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks at the federal level. Nationwide.
Now, this bill will not pass – right now, anyway – but what this signals is devastating to me both generally, as a woman who believes in her right to her own body, and specifically, as a woman who has also lost a baby, and who would have, like Teigen, have undergone an abortion had that option been presented to me.
I’ve discussed my ectopic pregnancy here before, but here’s what makes it pertinent to this conversation: I did not end up having an abortion, because I was misdiagnosed. I ended up having a life-threatening ruptured fallopian tube, and had to have emergency surgery to remove both the fetal tissue and part of my own reproductive organs.
So would I have had an abortion? Would I have removed fetal tissue with absolutely zero chance of sustained life in order to prevent severe health consequences to myself? Absolutely.
If you want to put it in a more selfless context, which I shouldn’t have to, but sure – would I have had an abortion to save my own life and prevent my two existing children from potentially growing up without their mother? Yes. And it shouldn’t be up to the state to decide just how much risk I’m willing to take with my own – and my children’s – lives. That’s my choice, if I want to risk my life or not.
Not according to Lindsey Graham. Granted, his bill includes exceptions for rape, incest and pregnancies that threaten maternal health, but my question to Graham would be how, precisely, he defines maternal health. What risk is risk “enough”?
