A woman is blaming Tennessee for the potential loss of her fertility after she traveled out of state for an abortion and suffered complications.
Breanna Cecil told the Independent she had long dreamed of having a large family, but those hopes are now dashed. She lost one ovary and fallopian tube in a botched abortion, which she blames on her home state of Tennessee.
Last year, Cecil found out that her preborn child had acrania, a fatal condition where the fetus has no skull bones. In Tennessee, preborn children are protected from abortion, even if they have been diagnosed with a serious birth defect, unless the mother’s life is at risk. Cecil’s was not.
She was told that her child may die before she reached 20 weeks, and she decided that she couldn’t “mentally handle” questions about her pregnancy, or be a “good mom to [her] little boy” if she had to deliver a stillborn baby, so she decided to have an abortion. This meant she traveled to Chicago, where she underwent a dilation and curettage, or D&C, procedure.
In a D&C, a surgical abortion procedure most often committed in the first trimester, the abortionist forcibly dilates the woman’s cervix, and then uses a powerful suction vacuum to remove the preborn child from the uterus. The abortionist then uses a curette to scrape the walls of the uterus to ensure nothing is left behind. Complications can include incomplete abortions — when pieces of the baby’s body are left behind — damage to maternal organs, and death.
Cecil experienced some of these complications firsthand, when her abortionist left parts of her baby inside her body. She began to have a fever and back pain after returning to Tennessee, where it was discovered that the abortion had not been completed. Doctors in Tennessee did another D&C procedure to remove the rest of the remains, but she still was not getting better. She eventually went to the hospital, where it was discovered that she had an abscess — a collection of pus or infected fluid that is surrounded by inflamed tissue — in her abdomen, which included some of her reproductive organs. Ultimately, her ovary and fallopian tube had to be removed. Since then, she and her husband have not been able to get pregnant, which she blames on the state of Tennessee.
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“Right now I feel like they took that away from me,” she said of her fertility. Emotionally, she said she is still grieving the loss of her child. “I think about that baby all the time,” she said. “I just want that baby. Why didn’t that work out?”
It’s heartbreaking to know that a child has a birth defect that will result in death. But even if someone is going to die, it isn’t merciful or ethical to kill them faster so it will be easier on their loved ones. And Cecil unfortunately learned a harsh reality about the abortion industry; her anger should be directed towards the abortionist who botched the abortion. The abortionist committed a shoddy procedure on her, did not ensure that it was completed, and then sent her home, without a care as to the consequences — something many women across the country has tragically experienced. Ultimately, her choice to have an abortion is what led to the potential loss of her fertility, not laws protecting preborn lives.
