The nurses followed and began wiping the warm ultrasound gel from her exposed abdomen as the doctor leaned over her shoulder to speak to her fiancé, Adam Quinn. She remembered being quiet, her body still. What did they mean, they couldn’t have an abortion? Just two weeks earlier, she and her fiancé had learned that her fetus had a condition that prevented it from surviving outside the womb. If she tried to finish, she could become seriously ill or even die, her doctor said. Now, she was being told she couldn’t have an abortion she didn’t even want, but needed. “Are they just going to let me die?” he remembers wondering. In the blur around her, she heard the doctor and nurses talking about a clinic in Georgia that could do the procedure now that the legal risks of doing it in Tennessee were too great. She heard her fiancé swear and with frustration in his voice she told the doctor that this was stupid. He heard the doctor agree. Just three days earlier, the US Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to abortion. A Tennessee law passed in 2020 that would have banned abortions at about six weeks of pregnancy had been blocked by a court order but could go into effect. Mrs. Underwood never thought any of this would affect her. She was 22 and excited to start a family with Mr. Queen, who was 24. She and Mr. Queen went back and forth for days before deciding to terminate the pregnancy. She was afraid of abortion. She had cried in the car on the way to the clinic. She had heard that the Supreme Court was overturning Roe v. Wade, but believed that since she had planned her abortion before the ruling and before any state bans went into effect, the procedure would be allowed. Tennessee allows abortion if a woman’s life is in danger, but doctors were afraid to make those decisions too soon and face criminal prosecution. Across the country, the legal landscape was changing so quickly, some abortion clinics turned away patients before the laws officially took effect or while legal battles were being fought in state courts. Centuries-old prohibitions hanging on the books were activated, but then challenged just as quickly. In states where abortion was still legal, clinic wait times increased as women from states with bans sought alternatives. It was in this mess that Mrs. Underwood was sent home, still pregnant and upset. What would happen now? The doctor said she needed to go to Georgia, where abortions were still legal up to 22 weeks, although the state had a ban that would soon go into effect.
Read more about abortion issues in America
How would her fiancé get time off work to make the trip? How would they find money for a hotel and gas? How long did she have before she got sick herself? A new, more terrifying question hit her: What if she felt a kick?
“I want a girl”
Mr Queen said he realized his fiancee was pregnant before he did. She had been throwing up almost every morning for an entire week and had started asking for Chinese food, which she usually hated. One night in May, after his shift as a manager at a Dollar General store, he brought home a pregnancy test for her. He hoped and prayed that he would bounce back positively. “I was ready to start our little family together and hit the ground running,” she said. To save money, they lived with his mother, Theresa Davis, and stepfather, Christopher Davis, in a family farmhouse in Pikeville, a town tucked into a leafy valley about an hour outside of Chattanooga. Mrs. Underwood entered the upstairs bathroom. It was her first pregnancy test and she didn’t want to mess it up. She spent 15 minutes staring at her bedroom TV, waiting. Her phone alarm went off and she glanced at the test, picking it up and shaking it. A line is crossed in the positive column. For a few seconds he stopped breathing. “I hope it’s a boy,” her fiancé said. Her heartbeat quickened. She was smiling. “I know you want a boyfriend! You already have a girlfriend,” he said with a laugh. “But you know I want a girl.” Mr. Queen had a child with a previous girlfriend and part of his income went to child support. He and Ms. Underwood had been dating for the past four years. he proposed on a trip to Virginia Beach earlier this year. On Mother’s Day, the couple revealed the pregnancy to both sets of parents through cleverly wrapped ‘Best Nana Ever’ gift baskets. At first, they faced some backlash for getting pregnant before tying the knot, but with their wedding date set for late June and the excitement of a new baby, they all got over it. At her first checkup at a local free clinic, they learned she was 13 weeks pregnant and due on November 23rd. The couple left the date happy. Mr. Vasilissa worked full time, but his fiancée did not have health insurance. They were waiting to be approved for Medicaid so she could schedule an appointment with a licensed obstetrician. Mrs. Underwood went about her routines, tending to her three cats, fish and other pets, and feeding the neighbor’s goats. Mr Quinn’s mother, Mrs Davies, hung the ultrasound photos in her bedroom. He was staring at them when he noticed something. “I called Madison and said, ‘Is your baby a cat?’ he said. “Because the head looked like it had ears.”
Olivia
At Mrs. Underwood’s next appointment, a nurse promised more ultrasound pictures for the family to take home. The nurse asked questions, took measurements and confirmed her due date. But then it was “real quiet”, Ms Underwood said. “He said it would be a few minutes, and the nurse would be in and talk to you and ‘let’s see what we do from here,’” she said. For Ms Davies, who accompanied Ms Underwood to the appointment, and who had experienced seven miscarriages, the words “rang a bell” in her head. “It doesn’t sound good,” she told her bride-to-be. At first, the nurse said there was a mild case of encephalocele, or a growth at the back of the fetus’s neck due to the neural tubes not closing during the first month of pregnancy. Encephalocele occurs in about 1 in 10,500 babies born in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The nurse told the family that it could be corrected through surgery and that there could be an intellectual disability or developmental delay, possibly seizures. Ms. Underwood and her fiance were “OK with it,” she said. But she was worried that the baby would have to be operated on immediately after birth. “I was so scared,” she said. They also found out they were having a girl. They decided to name her Olivia, after Mrs. Underwood’s grandfather, Oliver. Doctors referred the family to Regional Obstetrical Consultants, a chain of clinics specializing in high-risk pregnancy treatments. The practice declined to comment for this article. There, the family said they learned more devastating news: The fetus had not formed a skull. Even with surgery, doctors said, there would be nothing to protect the brain, so he would survive at most a few hours, if not minutes, after birth. Even then, Ms Underwood hoped to carry the pregnancy to term so she could at least meet her baby and donate the organs if possible. “It seemed like the only option,” he said. “Everything happens for a reason.” But doctors told her that fetal brain matter was leaking into the umbilical sac, which could cause sepsis and lead to critical illness or even death. Doctors advised her to terminate the pregnancy for her own safety. “We were talking about it because I thought maybe I could beat the odds,” he said. “But then I got scared.” He added that, “I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t regret it. Because me and Adam, we’re going to have to deal with this for the rest of our lives.” They postponed their wedding and scheduled the abortion at Regional Obstetrical Consultants’ Chattanooga location for Monday, June 27.
Caught in Panhellenic Battle
Before June 24, the day of the Supreme Court decision, Tennessee allowed abortions up to the 24th week of pregnancy, but clinics rarely performed any after the 20th week, said a spokesman for the Knoxville Center for Reproductive Health, one of the largest abortions. clinics in Tennessee. Aside from specialty abortion clinics, only a few medical centers in the state provided the procedure. The Knoxville Center said it stopped providing abortions Friday when Roe was overturned pending a change in Tennessee law. That day, Herbert Slattery III, the state’s attorney general, filed a motion with the U.S. Court of Appeals to lift a nearly two-year-old injunction blocking an effort to ban abortions after about the sixth week of pregnancy. . The order was lifted a day after Mrs Underwood’s abortion was annulled. Her parents and grandparents, who oppose abortion, took this as a sign to reconsider. They had prayed to God to stop the abortion if it wasn’t to happen, and when it didn’t, they were convinced that she should try to carry the pregnancy to term. “We were just hoping for a miracle,” said her mother, Jennifer Underwood. They said he had to give birth to see Olivia, say goodbye and bury her. He told them no. “I do what I think I can handle,” Mrs. Underwood would later say, sobbing between words. Mr Queen’s mother said she supported the couple’s decision from the start. At the age of 12, she was raped and ended up giving birth to a stillborn baby. “Religion has nothing to do with it. “Sometimes your body just does things to you and if you have to have an abortion, don’t feel guilty about it,” she said. As stress on the couple grew, Mr. Queen quit his job to take care of…
