A Difficult Phone Call
We’re so delighted with the successful abortion pill reversals, but there are difficult moments we’d never have dreamed would occur as a result. Ever since we started to provide ultrasounds, we realized just how frequent miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies are. Before, miscarriages were spoken of, and everyone seemed to know of two or three close friends who’d lost a baby early in pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies were a scary thought that few people had experienced in their own circles. Now we spend more time on the phone, comforting a woman who didn’t want to come in, but needed to tell someone what she was experiencing, and we’d been there for her ultrasound, so we are often her choice.
For Abortion Pill Reversal clients, we encourage them to come back for a couple of ultrasounds, to be sure that everything is going well. We keep in contact throughout the pregnancy, always praying that those phone calls bring the answers we hope. But this phone call wasn’t from an APR client, it was a woman who’d never come to the Life Center before. She spoke so rapidly, it was hard to understand. She said her friend had come to us and we gave that client a medication that saved her baby. The woman on the phone hoped to receive that same medication. She’d begun bleeding that morning, and it hadn’t stopped. She didn’t have a doctor, and hadn’t even received an ultrasound yet, but she’d taken a pregnancy test at home, and knew she was pregnant. She was desperate to keep her baby alive, but the Abortion Pill Reversal procedure is a carefully developed medical procedure, one that can only be provided to a woman who’d begun the abortion pill procedure. Telling a woman that even though the symptoms are the same, we can’t give her the same pill that saved her friend’s baby… how do you handle that? She understood, and agreed to go to the emergency room, but her heartbroken cries echoed through the phone.
It’s wonderful that the client who’d had her baby saved thought of us to save her friend’s baby. She clearly saw us as a location to turn to in crisis, and a clinic that seeks to save babies. All of that is true. Unfortunately, not every challenge in a pregnancy can be healed with the same methods. But love can be offered in any circumstance, and no matter how a pregnancy is ending, we are there with love and compassion. It was fitting that this call came in October, the month for Awareness of Pregnancy Loss. Let’s all take some time to remember the children who never made it past birth, and the mothers who never got to hold their babies.