ICYMI: Our Abortion Stories [Elle]

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT

Elle: Our Abortion Stories
By Madison Feller and Rose Minutaglio
May 4, 2022

Key Points:

• As we prepare for a nation without Roe, ELLE brought together… members of Congress who have been open about their personal experiences with abortion.
  
  
• These members chose to participate in ELLE’s historic roundtable discussion because they know the power that comes from making the political personal. In sharing their own stories, they are giving a voice to the hundreds of thousands of people who, each year, for hundreds of thousands of reasons, choose to have an abortion.

• DSCC Chair Sen. Gary Peters:

[My then-wife and I] were expecting a second child, a child that we wanted and were looking forward to bringing into the world. But toward the end of the second trimester, her water broke. We knew something was really wrong. The physician said, “There’s no way this fetus can survive.” But because there was a faint fetal heartbeat, he had to get approval from the hospital board. And I’ll never forget listening to the message on the answering machine as he said, “I’m very sorry to say the hospital refused my request.” He said he was fearful that my wife had an infection, and that if she waited any longer to have an abortion she could lose her uterus. He said, “If you wait even longer, you’ll lose your life.” We were fortunate a friend of ours is an administrator at a different hospital, and he was able to get us in immediately.

I was surprised at how many men came to me as well that said, “I went through this as well with my wife.” We don’t talk about it, but because we don’t talk about it, and we keep it in ourselves, it just eats away at us as well. It’s such a complex issue.

It’s such an intensely personal issue, and to have politics get in the middle of it—to get hard-and-fast rules make decisions for people in one of the most vulnerable times that they will probably ever have in their life—is simply unacceptable.

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