Denise (2016) – Northern Ireland

Denise Phelan was denied a legal abortion three years ago in circumstances so extreme she still finds it harrowing to speak about it. “My anger wakes me up at night. It’s a deep, almost in-the-bone anger,” she says. She and her husband, Richard Gosnold, are also still grieving for the loss of their baby, Alenja. Their trauma has been prolonged and they feel it is too late now to try for another pregnancy.

She became pregnant in late 2015 at age 40, but testing after the 10-week scan brought devastating news. There was a fatal genetic disorder, which meant that the foetus would die in the womb or at birth. One doctor told the couple: “You can go to the mainland,” meaning travel to England. However, Phelan suffers from extreme and debilitating migraine, which is triggered by stress. She became very ill and could not travel. After researching her rights, she found there was a mental health clause that could enable her to have a termination in Northern Ireland. Phelan had recently survived several years of intense depression. The couple were terrified about the potential long-term impact of the dilemma she was now facing. But no one was willing to refer her for an abortion in Belfast.

“I felt as though this wall of religious and political hatred had descended around us,” says Phelan. “We were seeing all these doctors, but it was like a nail was being driven into you and each one of them was driving it one blow further. I realised no one was going to help us. It was cruel beyond belief. It was mental torture. We were just set adrift, totally alone. We had no choices. I had to give up. I had to go out and get maternity clothes and people were congratulating me and asking when the baby was due. I was sent to a bereavement midwife at the same time as the baby was still alive and active in my womb. I had to go to antenatal classes. We were also told that if the baby was still alive at birth she would be in pain and have to live her brief life on a morphine drip.”

When she was 36 weeks pregnant, Phelan fell as she was out walking. At a scan the next day she said to the doctor, “She’s gone, isn’t she?” The baby died on a Wednesday. The following Monday, birth was induced.

“I cry every day,” says Phelan. “I had postnatal depression and both of us have had suicidal thoughts. We both suffer from insomnia. I had to leave my job.” Gosnold, who is an artist, was offered medication and put on a waiting list for counselling.

Source: ‘The doctors in Northern Ireland knew my baby would die. But I was refused an abortion’ – The Guardian, Oct 6, 2019

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Chelsea (2018) – USA

Woman with serious health risks and lethal fetal abnormality denied abortion at hospital because she wasn’t sick enough

In December 2018, Chelsea was about 15 weeks into a planned pregnancy when a specialist at University of Cincinnati Medical Center told her that her fetus had triploidy, a condition where three sets of chromosomes develop in each cell instead of two. Babies with triploidy are stillborn or die shortly after birth. The news devastated Chelsea, who had suffered a miscarriage months earlier. The condition also put her at higher risk for choriocarcinoma, a fast-growing cancer, and preeclampsia, a potentially deadly pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure. Chelsea’s blood pressure had already been unusually high. Then the doctor delivered the final blow: Affiliated with a public university, the hospital would end her pregnancy only once Chelsea was too sick to continue it.
“My head was spinning because of the information that I was being given, but I just felt like I was on an alien planet,” Chelsea told Rewire.News. “There was no question in my mind: I’m not going to risk my organ function to carry a non-viable pregnancy to term.” The “best-case scenario [was] the baby would be stillborn, or the baby would suffocate to death, which to me was not something that I was willing to put my child through,” she said.

Chelsea wrote a letter to a state legislator who was trying to ban the particular abortion method that she needed. “I cannot have a dilation & curettage (D&C) in a hospital like I did with my last loss, as this baby has a heartbeat,” Chelsea wrote. “Instead I have to go to an abortion clinic with doctors and staff that I do not know. I have to go in with protesters screaming at me on the worst day of my life. I am praying for a miscarriage. I never thought I would say that after experiencing one before. But I thank God termination is an option for people like me.”

Fortunately, Chelsea was healthy enough to get her abortion at a Planned Parenthood clinic, but she needed three visits to comply with Ohio’s 24-hour waiting period: One for counseling and an ultrasound, one to sign a consent form after the doctor who would perform her procedure had signed it, and a third for the abortion. She was also forced by law to read a packet about how she could instead parent her child—something she desperately wanted to do—or put her baby up for adoption. Each barrier felt like another blow. “It just feels like death by a thousand cuts,” Chelsea said. “I kept saying, stick the knife in and keep twisting it, because it just made a bad situation horrific.”

Source: Rewire.news, ‘Not Dead Enough’: Public Hospitals Deny Life-Saving Abortion Care to People in Need, Mar 7, 2019, by Amy Littlefield

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