The 19th is sharing the story of Tina (no last name given), a married mother of one daughter who "desperately" wanted another baby. But shockingly, when she finally became pregnant with a "healthy" child, she chose to have an abortion almost immediately.

Key Takeaways:

• Tina desperately wanted a baby and turned to IVF and surrogacy.

• While her sister-in-law was carrying Tina's baby as a surrogate, Tina was surprised to learn that she, too, was pregnant. The babies would be eight months apart.

• The day after Tina took the positive test, she ordered the abortion pill.

• She said the timing was 'cruel' and that her family 'needed' her to abort her baby.

The Details:

The 19th's headline reads, "Tina wanted another baby. She also needed an abortion. Texas made both harder." Texas does not restrict IVF, but it does protect preborn babies from abortion. This story shows why that is so important.

According to The 19th, Tina had been struggling to become pregnant for years and experienced "miscarriage, fertility treatment, another miscarriage, more fertility treatment and an ectopic pregnancy."

She was diagnosed with Asherman's syndrome, a condition in which scar tissue and adhesions form inside the uterus. In about 90% of women who develop Asherman's syndrome, the cause is repeat dilation and curettage (D&C) procedures due to miscarriage treatment and first trimester abortion. Other causes include radiation treatment, surgery to remove fibroids or polyps, intrauterine birth control devices, and endometriosis.

Tina underwent several surgeries, but she continued to miscarry.

Ultimately, Tina decided to take her sister-in-law up on her offer to act as a surrogate. They transferred one embryo, a boy, and her sister-in-law became pregnant. Tina was finally getting the baby she wanted — and then came the ultimate surprise.

As her sister-in-law passed the 34-week mark of pregnancy, Tina found out she was pregnant, too.

"She had asked her doctor so many questions," wrote Shefali Luthra, reproductive health reporter. "But now she had a new one: Could she get an abortion? Desperate and resolute, she needed to decide whom she could trust ..."

Once desperate to get pregnant, Tina was now desperate for an abortion.

Luthra wrote:

[Tina] and her husband never considered having three children. Staying pregnant now would mean two newborns eight months apart. It would mean another crib, maybe a bigger car. In 18 years, another stack of college tuition bills. Another pregnancy, she worried, would keep her from being there for her other two children: the daughter she had and the boy she’d been counting down the days to meet. 

Still, Tina — who had spent years trying to get pregnant again — hadn’t thought of herself before as the kind of person who would get an abortion. She had peed on so many sticks, hoping for a positive test.

Now that it was here, the thing she'd been wanting for so long, it was wrong.

When Tina told her husband she was pregnant, his response was, "Sh*t." They decided to get an abortion because, she felt, "her family needed" it.

It was portrayed as "dystopian" that she lived in Texas, where most preborn children are protected from abortion. The day after the positive test, she said she "reached out to" an online abortion pill business in Massachusetts, where abortion is allowed up to birth.

"She got a prompt response: The standard medication abortion regimen doesn’t work for people with ectopic pregnancies. Because of her medical history, she would need an ultrasound confirming that medication was safe for her to take," wrote Luthra.

So Tina went to Planned Parenthood, but it could not rule out an ectopic pregnancy and sent her to the hospital. But the hospital couldn't locate the baby, either.

The next day, she called her doctor and scheduled a time to go in. Blood work appeared normal, and an ultrasound a few days later revealed the baby was in the uterus and the pregnancy was "healthy."

So, Tina order abortion pills — mifepristone and misoprostol — online that same day with expedited shipping. She paid $250.

“I remember thinking about the irony of it all,” she said. “I remember being — it sounds silly, but almost like I felt duplicitous to myself and others because I was the person that always wanted to have another child and worked so hard and did everything within my means. I did everything I possibly could to try to have another child, and here I am pregnant and about to have an abortion.”

She had taken misoprostol before for a miscarriage, but this time, wrote Luthra, "there was a power in choosing to take pills ... She was doing this herself."

That weekend, she took the pills. After days of cramping and bleeding, the abortion was over. "No longer pregnant," wrote Luthra, "Tina could finally focus on her son, now only weeks from arriving."

Think about the implications of that statement — ending the life of one child to "focus" on the other one.

Why It Matters:

Abortion and IVF are two sides of the same coin: they both treat children as commodities that adults can create and destroy to fit their own desires.

Abortion

Induced abortion always intentionally ends the life of a human being who has been labeled inconvenient or unwanted by his parents or by society. More specifically, the first drug of the abortion pill regimen, mifepristone, kills human embryos by depriving them of the oxygen and nutrients they need to survive. The second drug, misoprostol, induces the contractions to expel that child.

Tina desperately wanted another baby — but just one baby.

The pro-abortion mindset says she was justified in aborting her baby because he wasn't conceived at her ideal time. In fact, she even claimed that "The timing was just so cruel." She saw a miracle and said, "No, thanks."

Part of the issue with the "timing" was that she was already expecting a child, but another woman was pregnant with that child. She had invested a great deal of money and time in IVF and surrogacy, and another woman had loaned Tina her own body to carry that child.

She didn't tell her sister-in-law that she was pregnant because, as Tina's husband wondered, "[W]hat if sharing this news somehow tainted what felt still like the most generous thing another person could do for them? What if it made it seem as if they didn't actually care about what their sister-in-law had given them?"

He said, "To even tarnish that a little bit is so awful because it’s such a beautiful, amazing once-in-a-lifetime gift — and then to have anything tarnish it is just so dispiriting."

However, it's impossible to know how the sister-in-law would have felt, because she never knew.

Instead of seeing this miracle baby as a gift, he was seen as an obstacle to the life they wanted — an intrusion into their plans.

IVF

On the flip side, IVF and surrogacy treat children as products that can be created, tested for quality, labeled, and then destroyed if they don't pass inspection. About a million are assumed frozen in time. Only about seven percent survive to birth.

Designer fertility businesses are popping up offering to screen embryos for IQ, height, eye color, likelihood of acne, hair color, and other traits so parents can pick their "best baby." The company Nucleus Genomics will even test embryos for a potential future risk of a health condition like breast cancer.

Nucleus founder Kian Sadeghi believes, "[T]he parent and the physician [should] decide what and how they want to implant" (similar to the pro-abortion "woman and doctor" and "choice" mantras).

It's the false and unethical idea that children are products to build, test for "quality," and destroy when they don't fit into the parents' desires.

The Bottom Line:

This story is an example of how much human beings want to believe they are in control of everything in their lives.

We aren't.

Tina couldn't control whether or not she became pregnant, so she used IVF to try to control it. Then she became pregnant when she wasn't trying, so she tried to control that with abortion.

Sometimes life throws us curveballs. She will never be able to fully control her children's lives or their health or what happens next. With her history of miscarriage, the baby she aborted may not have survived, but it would have been a miracle if he or she did.

A best friend for his or her brother. Not a disaster.