Maybe it gives you time to think about it – but at the time, you feel a baby, you become attached to the baby, and every time it moves it reminds you that you’re going to put an end to its life and it’s very hard to imagine taking more time. It really is.… You imagine your baby. This is your baby. Hard to think of it as a fetus – you say fetus, but you imagine a baby. It moves and you become attached to it. Every time it moved those three days, I said, ‘Please don’t move.’
Barbara Katz Rothman on waiting three days before her child’s abortion appointment, “The Tentative Pregnancy: How Amniocentesis Changes the Experience of Motherhood” (New York: WW Norton & Company, 1993) 193 – 194.
