A Son
While waiting for our possession to move from Berkeley to State College, we stayed at Rita’s parent’s house in Michigan. My parents were living very near at that time also. Rita was about 20 weeks pregnant then and had already had two miscarriages. One night she woke me and said she thought her water broke. We went to St. Joseph’s Medical Center, and they told us that she would deliver the baby within 72 hours. At a gestational age of 21-weeks, the baby would surely not survive. They suggested aborting the pregnancy. Rita told them she couldn’t do that as she could feel the baby moving. The biggest risk in waiting was apparently infection, so we decide to wait and see. They transferred her to the University of Michigan Medical Center, where she remained on bed rest for seven weeks.
It seems like every few years the conservatives in this country get all fired up because liberals want to allow late-term abortions. What is usually lost in the rhetoric is that what liberals want is for doctors to not be charged with murder for performing late-term abortions that are, of course, deemed medically necessary. I have to say it was pretty shocking to hear the first doctor that saw Rita propose aborting the pregnancy. He certainly was pushing this on us, but I think he thought the risk, i.e., something serious happening to Rita that could possibly lead to her not being able to have children, was much greater than the highly unlikely reward, i.e. the baby being born at least four or five weeks after the amniotic sack broke.
While I’m strongly pro-choice, I am also strongly not anti-life. Deciding whether or not to terminate the pregnancy never really seemed like an option to us as we naively didn’t see the harm in just waiting it out. I am still not quite sure what the harm in waiting was. I think the doctor just felt that there was no possible way the baby would be born at a gestational age at which it would survive. I have no idea how an abortion at 20 weeks into a pregnancy would be done. I suppose they would probably just induce labor.
This story has another abortion-related twist in that the doctors actually decided to induce labor at 28 weeks. Obviously, they did force us to do this but their argument was that, with almost no amniotic fluid buffer, the baby’s lungs were not developing as they should and most babies born at this time have good outcomes. Rita and I actually thought about this a lot but we agreed that what the doctors said made a lot of sense, so we decided to have them “abort” the pregnancy. In every sense of the word, the doctors were performing an abortion because they were inducing the termination of a pregnancy. Of course, many women have labor induced or cesarian sections, and these could all be deemed late-term abortions. Of course, the doctors doing these procedures and the women having them done have no intention for the baby to die, but what if it does?
Caleb very nearly did not make it, and it’s interesting to consider the ramifications had he not. Rita and I certainly would have second-guessed the decision to induce labor for the rest of our lives. Should the doctors have then been held responsible for Caleb’s death? While I can’t imagine Rita or I thinking this, the laws the conservatives want and the liberal fight against would have made the doctors legally culpable. If the doctors knew they might be legally liable if their best medical advice leads to death, would they not even consider doing what they thought was medically the best option?
I think Pete Buttigieg, who I hope has a long career in politics, summed it up nicely while being questioned by Fox News’ Chris Wallace who asked, “Do you believe, at any point in pregnancy, whether it’s at six weeks or eight weeks or 24 weeks or whenever, that there should be any limit on a woman’s right to have an abortion?” Buttigieg replied, “I think the dialogue has gotten so caught up on where you draw the line that we’ve gotten away from the fundamental question of who gets to draw the line, and I trust women to draw the line when it’s their own health.” When Wallace pushed him about advocating the third trimester abortions he has about the best reply I think I’ve ever heard, “That’s right, representing one percent of cases. So let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, than almost by definition, you’ve been expecting to carry it to term. We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen a name. Women who have purchased a crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother or viability of the pregnancy that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice. And the bottom line is as horrible as that choice is, that woman, that family may seek spiritual guidance, they may seek medical guidance, but that decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.”
Caleb was born on September 18, 1998, at a gestational age of 28 weeks but his lungs were severely underdeveloped from a lack of amniotic fluid in the uterus. He weighed 2.5 pounds and remained on a ventilator for nearly four weeks. While the nurses tried to prepare us for the NICU, I was completely unprepared for Caleb’s challenges. During his first day there, we watched his blood pressure drop to the single digits. The nurses started preparing us for him not to make it. Fortunately, the medication started to work, and his blood pressure slowly rose. While all the days of his nine-week stay in the NICU were not that rough, there were many more ups and downs. It was an emotional roller coaster ride, a big wake-up to the real world, and a rough welcome to becoming a father and professor. Needless to say, my first semester at PSU did not go well.
I attempted to start teaching the class I was assigned while Rita was in the hospital. Fortunately, there was a direct flight from State College to Detroit, and I made the trip numerous times. One memorable flight was when employees of Northwest Airlines had just ended their strike; besides the pilots and flight attendants, I was the only person on the plane. After a few emergency trips to Ann Arbor, the department found someone to permanently teach my class which allowed me to spend all my time in Michigan.
While Caleb coming home from the NICU was a huge step forward, it also was a very trying time for Rita and me. He was still in need of a great deal of medical attention and constant monitoring. We hooked him up to a breathing monitor at night, which constantly false alarmed. We took him repeatedly to Hershey Medical Center to determine if his retinopathy was improving or worsening. We tried everything possible to get him to gain weight. Nothing worked because I think his ultra-thin build has nothing to do with being premature. We got letters home every year from school alerting us that his BMI was in the 0.5th percentile. That’s the problem with sick kids. You never know what is a problem and what is just individuality. This has been even more of an issue with Amanda.