Dr. Misha Pangasa: So once somebody’s water breaks, it sort of opens a door to bacteria or infection to enter the uterus. Sometimes there’s already some element of that bacteria or infection there, but it’s sort of confined to that area, and it’s not necessarily manifesting in the person’s overall health – they’re not having a fever, they’re heart rate is not elevated, they’re not appearing sick. But, once their water is broken, the sort of inevitability is that if you just left that alone for whatever number of weeks or months, they will eventually have an infection, and often times infection is what causes people to go into labor or to start to dilate their cervix or deliver. When that happens to somebody who’s so far from the threshold at which they might be able to take home a healthy baby, the reality is that it should still be their choice. A lot of people will say “I know my water is broken, I know that this probably is not going to go anywhere that I want it to, and I probably will not be able to take home a baby, but I just want to keep waiting until I feel like I have no other choice.” I absolutely support people in that decision, and we kind of watch them often in the hospital, or even sometimes they go home and monitor for fevers and things like that and can come back. There’s other people who say “I have kids at home. I can’t take the risk that by the time I get a fever, I might have an overwhelming infection in my whole body, and that if I don’t get an emergency abortion at that point in time, maybe my life will be in danger. If the chances of this are not that I’m going to be able to go home with a healthy baby, then I need to end this now, because I can’t take this risk for my life. I can’t take that risk and not know whether it’s going to happen tomorrow or the next week or the week after that. I have to go home to my kids. I have to go home to my life. I have to go home to my partner.” In those circumstances, people might opt for abortion. It’s a really individual decision, but the most important part is that people have the option to make the decision, which is generally not the case in a lot of places that have restrictions.
