In Minnesota, a woman who used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to expand her family chose to have an abortion after getting pregnant naturally. The Daily Mail reports that Hannah Stein was a mother of four when she became pregnant with her fifth child. Hannah and her husband of 17-years, Patrick, had undergone several rounds of IVF to conceive three of their children but felt like their family was complete, which is why Hannah says having an abortion wasn’t a difficult decision.
She also explained that she had an abortion when she was 22, about one year before she married Patrick. She said, “I felt too young, and there were too many other things I wanted to do first. I did not feel settled enough in my life to start having children.” Unbelievably, Hannah believes the abortion brought her and Patrick closer together because they had dealt with the stress of the pregnancy together.
“I would say that we were pretty tight already, but I feel like it probably made things a little bit stronger. When you have a situation like that in which things are difficult and you see how the other person in your relationship reacts to stress, I had tangible evidence that he would support me and be there for me and support my decisions,” Hannah explained.
As LifeNews previously reported, many women choose abortion for non-extenuating circumstances like Hannah. In fact, on average women give the following reasons for choosing abortion: having a baby would interfere with work, school or other responsibilities; they cannot afford a child; or they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner. The National Abortion Federation and the Guttmacher Institute reports that only 12% of women report physical problems with their health as the reason for having an abortion and only one percent (of aborting women) reported that they were the survivors of rape.
After Hannah had her first two children, she said she still didn’t feel regret about her first abortion. She said, “I know there’s a lot of discussion from the pro-lifers about how you see this ultrasound, or maybe once you have a baby, you will be hit with lament, guilt, or things will be different, but that’s not an experience that I had.”
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Initially, when Hannah and Patrick became pregnant they laughed that they conceived after struggling for seven years with infertility. Hannah said, “It was one of those things where we have a similar sense of humor and it was so Murphy’s Law, we just had to laugh about it. After all that trouble and all that time, to get pregnant by accident, undesired, it was funny. To us anyway.”
However, later they felt terrified at the idea of having another baby since they had two one-year-olds at home so Hannah underwent a surgical abortion. She did admit that she was nervous she would regret her decision eventually but so far has not felt that way.
Additionally, Hannah said she uses an analogy to help people understand why she wanted an abortion after struggling to conceive for so long. She explained, “It’s like wanting a Snickers bar in the morning, eating three, and then being presented with yet another Snickers bar that you no longer want.”
She concluded, “When you’re in the zone of infertility and you really want a baby, it is a physical thing, in large part. That was gone at this point. I had all these children and I was no longer in that zone of needing or wanting more children.”
Here’s what Hannah told Cosmopolitan about her struggle with infertility:
We tried for eight months, then I started charting. Then I did get pregnant, but I miscarried at around eight weeks. That was very difficult for me. I guess I could see how people could be confused about how an abortion would not be difficult for me emotionally but a miscarriage was, but I think it’s very logical. When you are really wanting to have a baby, it’s difficult to have a miscarriage. With terminating a pregnancy when you were young and not ready for a child, it’s not difficult. In fact, even regarding the miscarriage, I mourned, not because I thought it was a death of a child, exactly, but because I really wanted to have a child and I thought I was having one and then that opportunity was gone.
Altogether, we tried for about two years before having a successful run of IVF. As anyone who’s dealt with infertility can tell you, it’s really emotionally traumatic. This is the only thing you want and you can’t have it. It’s like every month is awful and you’re just miserable. There’s really no other way to put it.
IVF is straining to do, honestly, because you feel like if you do IVF and it doesn’t work, then what? This is your last chance. It’s a very emotional process. But we did the procedure and the egg retrieval, and I only came out of that first round with two embryos, and one was weird-looking. They put them both back and I didn’t have anything to freeze. One luckily did catch and that was Rafael. Two years later, we decided to try again. That time, again, I ended up with only two surviving embryos and nothing to freeze. That time both of them caught. So I came out with twins.
