I plan to give birth in Trump’s America, knowing it could kill me

It was 11.27pm on Wednesday, November 5 at my home in Vancouver, Washington, when I turned to my partner and stated dramatically, albeit not inconceivably: “I may be facing my own untimely death.”

After years of reporting, writing and producing for several major broadcast news organisations in Australia and the US, it dawned on me that I had “become the story”. As I watched the denouement of a dizzying inundation of red and blue map graphics on election day, I was struck by my casting as the protagonist of a grim storyline.

Amy La Porte, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington state, is planning to have a baby in America.

Next week, I will undergo elective surgery to remove scar tissue from my cervix and uterus, a necessary procedure if I am to bear a child. I will then begin a monthly cycle of fertility pills and injections. I am striving to conceive a child, but at the same time, I am also pursuing my own method of aborting a fetus. This dichotomous pursuit may save my life.

I am 38. I’m among the growing number of working women waiting to have a child. However, with a staggering one in four pregnancies ending in miscarriage, and as mine will be classified as a “geriatric pregnancy”, my chance of miscarrying or carrying a fetus with congenital abnormalities is higher than most. As if it were not traumatic enough to miscarry, often a woman will experience an incomplete miscarriage whereby part of the fetus remains. This can lead to fatal sepsis, a medical emergency that can only be cured with an abortion.

All women are at risk of preeclampsia, ectopic pregnancy or a ruptured fallopian tube, and they may need a doctor to save their lives by performing a legal abortion at any stage. Under a Trump presidency, a legal grey area now exists, and this simple life-saving procedure is not guaranteed. We are already witnessing the oppressive fallout of a conservative US Supreme Court’s abolishment of Roe v Wade, about which Trump was boastful. As a result, abortion decisions now fall into the hands of conservative states, 14 of which have criminalised the procedure.

In Texas, a woman named Josseli Barnica miscarried. She would have survived, but doctors refused to clear her uterus to stave off a deadly infection. As she lay dying, they told her husband they could not help because it meant ending the heartbeat of a fetus.

Amy La Porte in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, with her partner, Braden Reiber.Credit:

Several other states have banned abortions past six weeks of pregnancy, including the state of Georgia, the home of the CNN world headquarters, where I lived and worked for eight years. A state with a voting bloc that just flipped from Democratic blue to Republican red. There, a woman named Avery Davis Bell was left bleeding and in agony as doctors informed her of the state requirement to wait 24 hours before performing the abortion that would end her suffering. She survived; others won’t.

This uncertainty is leading to a surge in women across the country stockpiling abortion pills in the event they may have to save their own lives.

Today, abortions are common across all demographics, including Christians. Their reasons are as varied and layered as any other personal life choice made without interference from the government or our neighbours. A quarter of all American women will have an abortion in their lifetime, and based on voter turnout, it’s statistically possible that half of those who voted for Trump are among them.

Since Trump’s second-term win, my mammalian brain has been taking over, and my primal inclinations are spiralling into an amalgam of fear and determination, similar in tone and tenor, I imagine, to that of the suffragettes and bra-burners who came before me. They fought for their social equality and roared for their voices to be democratically counted. And if neither of those were won, then at the very least, they could have autonomy over their own bodies, right?

The United Nations Human Rights Committee has declared that access to abortion is an incontrovertible right. A reproductive right. A human right. This declaration was made in the aftermath of a bloody and recent history of “backyard” abortions and nightmarish scenarios of desperate women going to harrowing and sometimes deadly ends to abort pregnancies they could not have or did not want. The maths is clear: restrictive abortion laws lead to an increase in female deaths. In recent decades, more than 60 countries and territories have liberalised their abortion laws, and only four have rolled back these rights: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Poland, and now, the United States of America.

I am observing an emboldening of misogynistic and downright dystopian rhetoric, including rally banners at American universities heralding women as chattels. The day after Trump’s election win, photos were shared online of two men holding signs at the San Marcos Campus of the Texas State University, declaring: “Women are property”, “Homo sex is sin”, “Types of property: Women, slaves, animals, cars, land, etc”.

It is not known yet how dark the dark days ahead will be, primarily due to the president-elect’s vacillation on abortion and his previous declaration that women should be punished for getting abortions.

I refuse to report objectively on this issue any longer. I join women across America who are dusting themselves off, regrouping and organising. I will forgive myself for once believing the best path forward to protecting my rights was a passive one; hoping that polite grace made of hushed whispers and furtive glances in spaces they couldn’t hear us would be enough. I will remember that keeping the peace just means keeping their peace, not ours. I will arm myself with knowledge as I enter a fight of grit and resistance against those who would do us harm.

And yes, I will buy an abortion pill and hope I will never need to use it.

Amy La Porte is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington state.

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