Three doctors aim to help us understand what we're talking about when we talk about the procedure.
Consider what you think you know about what pregnancy development looks like. An online search, for example, quickly pulls up cheerful websites oriented toward expectant parents stocked with familiar illustrations of pregnancy progression that morph from Week 6 (not quite tadpole-like) to Week 9 (trending more human) and beyond. On a more political front, photographs of well-developed fetuses have long been common in anti-abortion iconography. Wherever you fall on the abortion debate, these images may influence what you understand gestation to look like. |
That's why, when the co-founders of MYA (My Abortion) Network, Erika Bliss, Michele Gomez and Joan Fleischman, last fall published photos of the early pregnancy tissue they encounter in their work as family medicine doctors, they were accused of having faked the images. As they explain in an essay this week, even ostensibly apolitical pregnancy websites and textbooks often offer a magnified view of embryonic development that is not what doctors see with the naked eye after an early abortion. The images that accompany their essay show tissue from abortions done from the fifth to ninth weeks of pregnancy, the period in which most procedures are performed in this country. What we see here are gestational sacs and sometimes bits of uterine lining. |
"Primary care clinicians like us who provide early abortions in their practices have long known that the pregnancy tissue we remove does not look like what most people expect," write the doctors. They often show this tissue to patients who come in for a first trimester abortion, and the reactions range from surprise to relief. "After Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and early pregnancy termination was banned across more than a dozen states, we felt it was important to make this information public," they write. |
Seeing these photographs raises questions: If more people knew what early pregnancy tissue looked like, would the debate over abortion change? Would it change how people feel about their abortions? |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment