That strange rustling heard in the background is the sound of abortion criminalizers and fetus fetishists around the world grasping at straws. With a recent one-in-a-million event of an ovarian ectopic pregnancy being carried to term, the anti-choice groups are claiming that this ‘miracle baby’ adds weight to their arguments against the use of abortion, even when a woman’s health is threatened.
The relieved husband and proud father described his wife’s pregnancy as a time bomb. A wanted child was born following very unusual gestation circumstances. Her mother is also alive and well, although news items do not relate whether her ovary needed to be removed.
Durga Thangarajah is the only child in Australia — and possibly the world — to survive a full-term ovarian pregnancy. [She] was delivered by Caesarean section after spending almost nine months inside her mother’s right ovary, stretching the organ’s tissue so taut that her hair and facial features were visible through the membrane. Involvement of the ovary is rarer, meaning the likelihood of delivering a healthy baby is just one in a million.Obstetrician Andrew Miller, of Darwin Private Hospital in Australia’s Northern Territory, who operated on Durga’s mother, Meera, said: “It’s an extraordinarily unusual outcome and I am not aware of anyone who has seen a [full] term ovarian pregnancy as we have here.”
A fetus can attach and grow almost anywhere inside the body so long as it has access to a blood supply. The most common type of ectopic pregnancy is where the egg develops in the fallopian tube. But a fetus can also attach to the liver, bowel or abdominal wall. At the risk of making fetus fetishists go ballistic, an ectopic pregnancy does ressemble, in this manner, a body’s invasion by a parasite.
Some may have noticed that Lifeshite and other similar groups always carry fear-mongering banners like “Abortion May Be a Factor in Auto-Immune Disease.” Yet the reality is there are a great number of health-threatening diseases or medical conditions that can be triggered by or develop during pregnancy: hypertension and pre-eclampsia, placental abruption or placenta previa, diabetes, varicose and spider veins, pruritic urticarial papules and plaques, pemphigoid gestationis, cholestasis and hirsutism, urinary incontinence or uterine prolapse. Many women chose pregnancy in full knowledge of the risks involved.
It’s appropriate that the Thangarajah couple named their daughter Durga – which means “Goddess” in Hindi – because there must have certainly been someone powerful watching over Meera’s pregnancy.
So, this proves the case of the really really rabid fetus fetishists who maintain that abortion is never medically necessary. They say, ‘See? Baby survived. Mother survived. Abortion is unnecessary.’
And ignore the fact that this is a one in a million happenstance. So, 999,999 women and 999,999 fetuses die for ONE ‘miracle’ bay-bee. Those are the odds the fetus fetishists would impose on women.
Beyond its fetus fetishizing rhetoric, the abortion-criminalizing doctrine views women as disposable. If women are not doing the fundamentalist religion-dictated duty of keeping their wombs open for impregnation, they’re of no use to the Pope and his ideological brothers.
I’ve always supported a woman’s right to choose. But as a woman who just lost a baby to an ectopic pregnancy, I wish medical science had some other option for me than to terminate a very much wanted pregnancy.
Why is it that we can transplant a heart from one human being to another and have a good outcome, but we aren’t able to move a tiny clump of misplaced cells just a centimeter to safety for both mother and child? Is it because there’s no monetary value in it for doctors? Is it because they fear malpractice if they even try? Is it because termination has always been the treatment of choice and no one in the medical establishment feels there’s any reason to try anything different?
A woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy is protected by the law. But no one has done anything to try to give a choice to women experience an ectopic pregnancy.
Been There, I am so sad for your loss.
There is lots of money to be made, it would appear, in developing complex and sophisticated in vitro fertilization techniques (IVF) but little financial recompense for research into rescuing ectopic pregnancies.
Such are the hopes we as women have for the children we want, and those we have – that we could always have the capacity to provide them with a nurturing environment and the safety they need to thrive, whatever the complications.
The reason why you cannot remove the embryo from the fallopian tubes and into the uterus is something to deal with the fact that it has already formed the placental membrane and such and there is none in the uterus. Therefore, it could not survive.