Florida's abortion ban supposedly has an exception for non-viable fetal abnormalities, but in practice, doctors and hospitals in the state won't provide that type of care because Republican have made the guidelines for what constitutes such a condition so vague that no medical professionals will risk penalties that include prison and permanent loss of medical license.
So we have forced-birth nightmares like the story of Milo, who lived for 99 minutes after being born without kidneys.
Milo Evan Dorbert drew his first and last breath on the evening of March 3. The unusual complications in his mother’s pregnancy tested the interpretation of Florida’s new abortion law.
Deborah Dorbert discovered she was pregnant in August. Her early appointments suggested the baby was thriving, and she looked forward to welcoming a fourth member to the family. It didn’t occur to her that fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a half-century constitutional right to abortion would affect them.
A routine ultrasound halfway through her pregnancy changed all that.
Deborah and her husband, Lee, learned in late November that their baby had Potter syndrome, a rare and lethal condition that plunged them into an unsettled legal landscape.
The state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of gestation has an exception for fatal fetal abnormalities. But as long as their baby’s heart kept beating, the Dorberts say, doctors would not honor their request to terminate the pregnancy. The doctors would not say how they reached their decision, but the new law carries severe penalties, including prison time, for medical practitioners who run afoul of it. The hospital system declined to discuss the case.
Instead, the Dorberts would have to wait for labor to be induced at 37 weeks.
For the next three months, the Dorberts did their best to prepare for their second son’s short life. They consulted with palliative care experts and decided against trying to prolong his life with high-tech interventions.
“The most important thing for us was to let him know he was loved,” Deborah said.
The day before Milo was born, the Dorberts sat down with their son Kaiden to explain that the baby’s body had stopped working and that he would not come home. Instead, someday, they told Kaiden, they would all meet as angels. The 4-year-old burst into tears, telling them that he did not want to be an angel.
Without functioning kidneys, a fetus with Potter syndrome cannot produce the amniotic fluid that allows the lungs to expand and that cushions the growing body. The babies who survive until birth typically have contracted limbs, club feet and flattened features from being compressed against the uterus wall.
But after Deborah’s 12-hour labor, Milo turned out to be 4 pounds and 12 ounces of perfection, with tiny, flawlessly formed hands and feet and a head of brown hair.
“I thought I had my miracle,” said Peter Rogell, the baby’s grandfather, who attended the delivery. He allowed himself a moment of hope until the obstetrician cut the umbilical cord that for 37 weeks had performed the functions Milo’s underdeveloped lungs and missing kidneys would now take over.
Milo remained blue, swaddled in a blanket hand-knit by his great-grandmother.
He never cried or tried to nurse or even opened his eyes, investing every ounce of energy in intermittent gasps for air.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Rogell said, recalling the persistent gulps that he thought at first were hiccups but turned out to be his grandson’s labored efforts to inhale.
Lee read a book to his dying son — “I’ll Love You Forever,” a family favorite that the Dorberts had given Kaiden for Valentine’s Day — and sang Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”
For 99 minutes that lasted a lifetime, they cuddled and comforted their newborn.
The entire point of this is to torture women, of course.
The entire point is to punish them for having sex without the specific goal of birthing and raising a child for the following 18 years and nine months.
The point is to force a woman to do that instead of getting medical abortion treatment.
The point is to control what women do with their bodies and to make them wards of the state, subject to carceral punishment.
To make them accept that they risk this now in states like Florida.
Republicans have already decreed this will happen. They own your vagina and what you are allowed to do with it.
That's the entire point.