Being a reproductive health care provider means seeing so many facets of motherhood: unfulfilled desire for it, desire for more children despite serious medical issues, desire to never experience it, and desire to avoid future pregnancies in order to care for one’s current family.

My patients are really the experts on what makes sense for them and their families. I cared for a patient with a very complex, perilous medical status who’d had termination recommended to her by another provider. She wanted to continue her pregnancy. Abortion was not an option she wanted to choose, for reasons she didn’t share—and whatever reasons she had were reason enough.

She delivered periviable twins, and one did not survive. As a provider and an outsider (and a mother myself), this seemed like a heartbreaking outcome. However, no one can do that calculus of grief and hope, weigh those benefits and risks, but the patient herself. Even as she grieved her loss, she felt joy at adding a new, tiny member to her family.