Ashley

When I was 22, almost one year after giving birth to my first baby, I found out I was pregnant again. I went to the hospital with severe abdominal pain and was told it was a possible miscarriage.

“I could have died and left my son motherless—over a zygote that could never have survived in the first place.”

I saw my midwife and got ultrasounds done, and they showed that it was not a viable pregnancy. It was an ectopic pregnancy. They gave me two doses of Methotrexate but they didn’t work. A few days later I was in such horrible pain I couldn’t move. The ectopic ruptured and I had to get a fallopian tube and a liter of blood removed immediately from my body.

I’m lucky to live where I do, and to have gotten the care that I needed for my reproductive health in my life-or-death situation. My experience made me have empathy where I only had sympathy, and it brings me so much closer to other women.

If a federal personhood law were passed, I could have died and left my son motherless—over a zygote that could never have survived in the first place. If a federal personhood law passed, women would die more often than they already do from ectopic pregnancies. This can never happen.