6A
/ NEWS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 2010 / THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN / KANSAN.COM
PREGNANCIES (CONTINUED FROM 5A)
anyining wrong.
She stays home for most of that semester, making it to one football game, her stomach already growing.
By that time, she's already decided to keep the baby. Erin's birth mother has told her what it was like to give her up, and Erin knows she isn't strong enough to do that.
She worries the baby will look like the father, that she'll be haunted by her attacker's face her entire life.
Adam Buhler/KANSAN
She wonders about the life she had planned for herself — the college degree from the University of Kansas she's been dreaming of, a career in music therapy. All will be put on hold to take care of a child she hadn't planned for.
Seventeen parishoners and a priest from Saint Cyril's Church in Kansas City, Kan., bow their heads in prayer over rosaries Saturday outside Aid for Women. Jeff Pedersen, manager of the private abortion clinic, said a group from the church located just four blocks away, prays outside the clinic the third Saturday of each month.
In the end, it's her baby. Her baby. And she wants to keep it that way.
She considers herself lucky.
Erin applies for Women, Infants and Children, a social welfare program designed to help low-income mothers. She's already worked out a deal with her parents to let her live there for free room and board — if she cleans the house.
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Erin wants a natural birth — no medication, no pills.
When her water doesn't break Nov. 16, the due date she's been anxiously awaiting, she reads up on some labor-inducing tricks online.
She eats cantalope, watermelon and kiwi.
But her baby doesn't come.
She goes to the hospital with her family at 7:30 a.m. Nov. 21, a troupe of loyal girlfriends on the way to hole up in the waiting room until it's over.
She's connected to an IV of Pitocin to induce labor, which begins an hour later.
By 3 p.m., Erin loses her will to resist relief from the pain. She asks for an epidural.
Thirty minutes later, it's finally time to push.
One. Two. Three. That's all it takes — three pushes — and Erin's baby boy screams his presence to the sky.
Erin fills out the birth certificate
Name: Isaiah Timothy Hettick. Mother.
Erin Marie Hettick. Father. Unknown.
There are 4 million births in the United States each year.
NATIONAL CENTER OF HEALTH STATISTICS
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That was two and a half years ago. In that time, Erin has graduated high school, attended a semester of college and, as of April 15, become a certified nursing assistant.
She's seen all but about 10 friends move on or away, although they were already distanced by the gap of their experiences
- hers as a mom, theirs as young singles.
- hers as a mom, them as young singles.
Her ideas of fun have changed from sleepovers, movies and the mall to knocking down empty boxes of Pampers and Huggies with Isaiah, scavenging for baby clothes and toys at garage sales with her mother and catching precious moments alone with her boyfriend. Claude.
Her money, which once went toward makeup, earrings and beads, now goes to diapers and baby toys.
She's gone from being a left-midfielder in soccer and a football cheerleader to "momma" and a qualified professional. And her wake-up call starts at 7 now, with a muffled cry from Isaiah sleeping near her, not the usual 10 to noon mornings of her 19-year-old peers.
'Saiah, her dimpled, milk-chocolate skinned, hazel eyed, curly-haired son, is ready for action early.
He's trying to talk now — "Gaga" being the operative word in most conversations. He can sign, too: thank you, milk, music, please.
It's only when Isaiah is lying down and Erin can see the roundness of his face that she thinks of her attacker.
Erin tries to forget the day she was raped, but she hasn't forgotten that humid night in jamaica when, after the shock of her pregnancy, she considered abortion.
"I hate to say that, but I did," she said.
"Because when you say, 'I would never have an abortion. That's terrible', that's because you're not really pregnant. Kind of in the back of your head you're like, 'I'm never going to be in that situation.'"
For that reason, she refuses to judge women who make that choice.
Some days, when she lets her mind wander while Isaiah is napping upstairs, Erin wonders how different her life would be if she had made a different decision.
Try as she might, she simply can't pic ture her life without Isaiah.
And she doesn't want to.
VANESSA'S STORY
The same thing happens on the second test. She doesn't bother with a third.
The pink lines come 10 seconds after she pees on the strip. It's supposed to take at least 60 seconds.
Those two lines tell Vanessa the weird feeling in her stomach isn't from a bad burrito. She is pregnant.
How is this possible?
Every night at 9, like clockwork, Vanessa takes a little blue pill to prevent this very thing from happening.
She's been on birth control for five years now - since 8th grade, when she and her fiance, Cameron, first got together. She's never missed a cycle. Until now, when she realizes birth control isn't always dependable.
What are we going to do?
At first, Cameron is excited. He's loved Vanessa since he first saw her in the halls of their middle school near Manhattan. And he's marrying her in three months anyway. He knows they'll have kids. It's all right with him if they start early.
Vanessa, on the other end of a long-distance phone call, brings him back to Earth.
He's a full-ride football player at a university up north with three years left to finish his degree in criminal law. She's a 20-year-old KU freshman with five years of pharmacy school in front of her and will remain deployable with the Army for the next year.
Initially planning to abort Vanessa, her mother carried her to term as a junior in high school at the father's insistence. She married Vanessa's father and had a second child, a boy, by him before she packed up her things and left. Motherhood overwhelmed her.
It isn't until the last Thursday in January that Vanessa goes to Kansas City's Planned Parenthood to carry out their final decision — a decision influenced by her own childhood.
6,365 abortions were performed in Kansas on women less than nine weeks pregnant in 2008
KANSAS DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT
Vanessa's mother deserted her husband and two children while Vanessa was still learning how to walk.
The two take four weeks to decide, going back and forth from abortion to school transfers and night classes.
So Vanessa grew up under the awkward but well-meaning love of her devoted father.
When Vanessa wanted pigtails, he tried his hardest to make that part straight. But it never was, and her pigtails never matched up.
When she wanted to go clothes shopping for six hours at a time, her father waited patiently outside the dressing room, holding her purse.
When it came time for Vanessa to get her first bra, he went with her.
Vanessa grew up wondering what she had done to make her mom run away.
Once she was old enough to understand, Vanessa vowed to never put her children through that, that she would be a better mother than hers.
Cameron, who grew up watching his parents struggle to make ends meet, comes to the same conclusion. He wants to earn enough money to provide for his wife and children — something he can't do as a college student.
So at age 20, facing the prospect of having a child, forgoing school and working full time to support it, Vanessa remembers that vow and decides not to continue her pregnancy.
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Vanessa waits in the lobby of Planned Parenthood with her two best friends, wondering why Cameron isn't there.
Yes, he's got football practice. Yes, he can't afford a plane ticket and still afford to feed himself the rest of the month. Yes, she told him it was OK.
But sitting there, amidst other scared faces, she notices how few men are there with their women.
Damn. Why isn't he here? He doesn't have to deal with the pain. Nothing's growing inside of him. Why isn't he here?
The aide calls her name and Vanessa leaves her friends behind in the lobby.
Vanessa looks to the screen and sees a tiny, gray dot just a bit larger than the other moving blurs that surround it. That dot is the five-week-and one-day old embryo.
Lying on the table, Vanessa waits as the nurse hooks up the equipment for a vaginal ultrasound — the embryo inside her is too small to be seen otherwise.
She's relieved: It's still early enough to take the abortion pill. She doesn't know if she could have gone through with an actual procedure if she were further along, despite reaching the decision she knows is right for her, for Cameron and for their family.
The nurse gives her a bottle containing four pills in exchange for $650, which Vanessa charges to her Visa card.
Put all four pills in your mouth at the same time, two on each side, between your gum and cheek.
Back in her dorm, she reads the back of the box:
They taste disgusting.
Wait 30 minutes for the pills to dissolve.
Ten minutes later, Vanessa is on all fours, experiencing a cramping pain in her stomach she has never known.
Instead of dissolving, they feel more like Winterfresh gum that's been chewed too long.
Her three roommates, unaware of what's happening, rush to her side.
Finally.
"Are vou OK?"
"Vanessa! Vanessa! What's wrong?
"Vanessa! Vanessal. What's wrong?"
"Do you need anything?"
"No! just leave me the fuck alone!" "...he..."
They obey.
She can't walk, let alone stand. For the next 30 minutes, she's writhing on the floor, unable to think of anything but the searing pain in her abdomen.
The pain subsides. She starts to bleed.
She grabs one of the thick, extra large, front-to-back menstrual pads she hasn't worn since she was 14 and afraid of tampons. The nurse had said the only way to be sure everything comes out is to avoid tampons.
She barely makes it back to her bed, she's so tired. She sleeps soundly through the night.
In the morning, her pad is already soaked with blood, something she'll have to get used to in the next four weeks.
But she feels fine — until she looks to her desk and sees the 4.5x6 inch black and white sonogram and the dot of the five-week-old embryo it shows.
In the aftermath, she drifts away from Cameron and cries daily.
She starts second-guessing herself and asking questions she'll never know the answer to.
Would it have had its daddy's smile? My almond-shaped eyes?
Would it have been a boy or a girl?
"You can't judge. I judged before experiencing it. You can't do that."
VANESSA
"I don't think a psychologist will be able to help you with that," she said. "It's something you have to do on your own, something you kind of have to come to terms with."
It takes her a few months, but she works through her depression, never once thinking to tell her father — she knows he wouldn't approve. She never considers seeking a psychologist for help.
Vanessa returns to Planned Parenthood for a check-up on March 11 — the pill worked as it was supposed to.
The news comes just in time: Vanessa and Cameron are married in Lawrence a week later.
"I was like 'No one has the right to do that,'" she said. "If you're woman enough to open your legs and do it, then you should be woman enough to take care of it."
Vanessa says she doesn't regret her decision, although before she got pregnant, she was against abortion.
But when she was confronted with her own unplanned pregnancy as a 20-year-old freshman, she gained a new perspective.
"You can't judge. I judged before experiencing it. You can't do that," she said. "It's not black and white. Everyone has their own reasons. Everyone has their own hopes for their children. Everyone has their own hopes for themselves. So you can't draw a fine line. I used to think you could, but you can't."
Before the first spoonful, like clockwork, she takes a little blue pill and thinks about the mother she will wait to become.
Every night before bed, Vanessa walks downstairs to the kitchen and pours herself a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats for a bedtime snack.
Edited by Sarah Kelly
A video simulation of an abortion performed on a papaya
A timeline of the progression of pregnancy, both of the fetus and the woman's body
A map depicting the number of abortions in various counties throughout Kansas in 2008
An interactive graphic showing the proportion of pregnancies, births and abortions throughout the nation
A brief compilation of reproductive right legislation and court decisions in the United States and Kansas
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