One of our senior residents recently called me about her patient, a married woman happy about her pregnancy who had been seeing our doctors from early on in her pregnancy. We’ll call her Lisa.

Lisa had just had her anatomy scan at 18 weeks of pregnancy, which is the sonogram which gets to show all the details – all the fingers and toes and everything in between. Usually this is an amazing experience and parents take home pictures which end up on fridges or on Facebook. But this day was very different for her and her husband. Her baby had no brain. Devastatingly, she faced the reality that her moving baby would never live outside the womb.

The resident called me and asked what we could do for her because the patient didn’t want to wait 28 more weeks to say goodbye to her baby.

The only way Medicaid insurance would cover an abortion would be if the pregnancy would threaten her life. Because she was healthy, there was no way we could obtain coverage.