I Wish I’d Had A “Late-Term Abortion” Instead Of Having My Daughter

We took Zoe home. We took her home knowing full well she would die there. For a year my family loved her.

We figured out how to feed her with a bottle by placing a finger under her chin, gently pushing upward until she bit down on the nipple to express milk. It took two hours for her to finish a bottle. We held her through countless sleepless nights because her body was unable to metabolize sleep hormones. She would lock up in tonic seizures, big blue eyes jerking to one side. She would go stiff lying beside me, and I would gather her in my arms, my nose in her hair, trying to memorize the soft smell of her. Sometimes I hoped she would go still, that her heart would stop, so that she would be free from suffering. I begged for it and dreaded it in equal measure.

We wrapped her in electric blankets in the middle of the Alabama summer because she couldn’t regulate her own temperature. We spent every major holiday in the hospital that year. On Thanksgiving, her lips were turning blue and she stopped eating because she had developed a kidney infection. She nearly died from the antibiotics.

On Christmas, we watched as she was stuck over and over again for IV placements and her veins blew one by one. She was put on Zantac, anti-diuretics, Synthroid, Klonopin, lorazepam, melatonin, Miralax. She was diagnosed with diabetes insipidus. We strung up red stockings at the foot of her hospital bed and listened to the chime of her heart monitor.

Between all of this, I started college at the local university. I was in and out of classes to take Zoe to doctor appointments, to switch out with my mother so she could go to work. I enrolled in the nursing program because it made the most sense at the time, given the situation. I made one friend, who two years later would become my husband. My life was in a spiral, but I felt like I had some tenuous control over it.

On Easter, we were back in the hospital with a urinary tract infection, proteinuria, uncontrollable fever, and the pediatrician told us to prepare ourselves, that this was what the end looked like. We were sent home when Zoe was considered stable.

Unlike the day of my attack, I remember the day Zoe died with brutal clarity.

She had been having seizures all night. This wasn’t uncommon, but my mother and I agreed we would take her to the ER at dawn to start the work-up. I got dressed to go, but my mother told me to wait until after my 8 o’clock class. It was the week of midterm tests, and we agreed I shouldn’t skip, especially because they probably wouldn’t even be back in triage until after I had finished. I could meet them later. I kissed Zoe’s cheek.

I was in the middle of writing an email to my English professor explaining that I had a family emergency and wouldn’t make the evening lecture. My mother was not answering her phone, and I distinctly remember thinking, Maybe this is it, and some terrible part of me was relieved at the thought.  

Nothing can prepare you for losing a child, even when you know it is coming. My best friend walked through the door of my family home. “We need to go to the hospital. Zoe just died.” I crumpled to the floor. It seemed like the only thing to do. I laid there sobbing, and just as it was during my assault, I was no longer in my body. I fixated on a dead moth on a window sill. The sun beat down on me through the glass.

Her heart had stopped. She died in my stepfather’s arms. I could not bring myself to look at her in death. I, too, felt like a husk.

At home we put all her things out of sight. I held her pajamas in my hands and felt such emptiness. I just wanted to slip socks over her tiny feet one more time, kiss her hands. We buried her with the blankets she could never be separated from. I wanted to lie down beside her. I wanted it all to be over. How was I meant to keep going? It was like a black hole opened up at the middle of me, sucking in and shredding all the pieces that were once good and tender, until there was nothing left of the person I was. Nothing at all.

The grief is consuming even now, and although it has no teeth or jaws, it still swallows me whole. It has derailed me countless times over the 12 years since her death. I am in bits. A part of me is still there wiping blood from white tile. I am a dead moth on the window sill. I am buried under so much dirt. And I am here in these words. I am immense.

I have three daughters now, and I love them with the sort of ferocity that can choke me sometimes. But I would be lying if I said I do not also grieve what was taken from me. I grieve the person I might have become if had not been a young victim, a young mother, forced into unimaginable circumstance, seeded by compounding traumas. Did that girl not also deserve mercy? Was her life any less important?

It should not have been this way.  

If I had been allowed the option to choose a “late-term abortion,” would I?  

Yes. A hundred times over, yes. It would have been a kindness. Zoe would not have had to endure so much pain in the briefness of her life. Her heart could have been stopped when she was warm and safe inside me, and she would have been spared all that came after.  

Perhaps I could have been spared as well.