I terminated my first pregnancy in 2007 at 21 weeks. That wasn’t what I wanted to do—my husband and I were trying to have a child. However, after a normal first trimester, it became apparent that the baby wasn’t growing at the expected rate, and we were referred up the chain for testing.

We ended up in a maternal-fetal medicine center where the high-resolution ultrasound revealed “multiple abnormalities incompatible with life,” abnormalities on the level of a brain that had never divided into two hemispheres. We waited two weeks for an amniocentesis to come back, and it revealed a diagnosis of full triploidy. It was a fluke of extreme bad luck, but the prognosis was clear: there was no chance for the baby’s survival.

At that point, there was no immediate threat to my health. However, there was also no chance of a good outcome from continuing, only risk to me, with a small but real chance that continuing a doomed pregnancy could mean permanent infertility or even death.

The choice, then, was heartbreaking but clear, and we induced a stillbirth. By the time we’d realized the pregnancy wasn’t normal and gone through the full range of testing, I was just past twenty weeks. I am very fortunate that I lived, at that time, in a state that allowed termination after twenty weeks. I had a wrenching but medically uneventful birth and went on to have a healthy baby within a year and another in 2015.

I now live in Wisconsin, which recently banned abortions after twenty weeks. Had I lived here when this happened, I would have been forced to continue to carry a baby that could not live, risking my own health and drastically compounding the emotional horror of the experience. I still mourn my daughter every day, but I cannot begin to understand how a position that would rather see me dead and neither of my sons ever born just to prolong a tragically doomed pregnancy can be called “pro-life.”