In two separate diaries over the last several years, I've told the story of how my mother's life was saved by a "partial-birth abortion" carried out on the delivery table in the 1950s. Given the escalating GOP war on women, it seems like time to do it again.
I am going to mildly violate site rules to post her story in full, from two separate print sources. The first is a letter she wrote to the Boston Globe, published on November 15, 1995. The second is the full text of an interview she gave to her local newspaper, the Amherst "Daily Hampshire Gazette." Neither of these sources is online; I have transcribed the originals which are in my files.
The Boston Globe:continued below the flip...One memorable day in 1955 I went into labor in my eighth month of pregnancy. I was conscious throughout and watched in the mirror as the tiny, perfect feet emerged and wiggled (it was a breech birth), then the rest of the body, up to the shoulders. It hung there and turned blue. The head would not come out, however much the obstetrician twisted and turned it. The baby, he ascertained, was hydrocephalic - it had "water on the brain" and a grossly enlarged head."May I do a craniotomy?" he asked. Knowing that this meant the destruction of the baby's skull and the evacuation of its brain, I gave my permission. What else was there to do?
