My wife and I had an abortion. AMA

I wanted to share our story due to everything that is going on recently and hopefully open a few minds to a rarely thought about reason for abortions.

First off, at the time, we had an almost 3 year old and were very excited to expand our family. At the anatomy scan, they were not able to get a good view of the whole heart and only 3 of the chambers were flared up. In the following days, we went to the high risk OB and they got better scans and diagnosed our unborn baby with a hypoplastic right heart syndrome with pulmonary atresia. Basically this means that the right ventricle of her heart never developed and therefore the pulmonary valve was sealed shut. Our baby had a 3 chamber heart.

In the coming days, we got a second opinion, and spoke with several doctor friends. Our outlook was horrible. The severity of the issues gave us about a 10% chance she would survive the first week. 100% chance she would require multiple open heart surgeries in the first year, and 100% chance she would need a heart replacement withing the first 10 years if she survived the first year which they gave us a "not good" answer when asking her chances of surviving the first year.

All things considered, we decided to terminate the pregnancy at 22 weeks. There were many reasons we considered, and ultimately didn't want our 3 year old's first memory to be the death of baby sister.

Due to our state of residence, this was not legal unless the mother's life was in danger so we had to go to Boulder, CO to have it done. And we did. It was a 3 day process. Everyone there was there terminating a wanted pregnancy. one couple had a baby with spinal Bifida iirc.
Yes, I still feel shame about it. Yes, I often think about what could have been, but ultimately I believe we made the best choice for our family.

There are hundreds of stories similar to ours on the message board Endingwantedpregnancies.com. they are all tragic, and they all are very hard to read.

All that to say, not everyone gets abortions as a form of birth control. There are situations where the baby has a deformity that makes them not compatible with life and in those cases, I believe terminating the pregnancy should be safely and easily available. Many issues such as ours aren't even diagnosed until the anatomy scan (20 weeks).

All that said, I expect the coming judgement and downvotes, but feel free to ask me anything and I'll do my best to answer.