Forced birth stories start to trickle out

Brooke Alexander cradles one of her twin daughters 

as she watches dad Billy High practice skateboarding tricks 

at the Portland Skate Park in Portland, TX

We all knew this day was coming. Now it is here. The Washington Post writes:

This Texas teen wanted an abortion. She now has twins.

Brooke Alexander found out she was pregnant 48 hours before the Texas abortion ban took effect

Running on four hours of sleep, the 18-year-old tried to feed both babies at once, holding Kendall in her arms while she tried to get Olivia to feed herself, her bottle propped up by a pillow. But the bottle kept slipping and the baby kept wailing. And Brooke’s boyfriend, Billy High, wouldn’t be home for another five hours.

“Please, fussy girl,” Brooke whispered.

She peeked outside the room, just big enough for a full-size mattress, and realized she had barely seen the sun all day. The windows were covered by blankets, pinned up with thumbtacks to keep the room cool. Brooke rarely ventured into the rest of the house. Billy’s dad had taken them in when her mom kicked them out, and she didn’t want to get in his way.

The hours without Billy were always the hardest. She knew he had to go — they relied entirely on the $9.75 an hour he made working the line at Freebirds World Burrito — but she tortured herself imagining all the girls he might be meeting. And she wished she had somewhere to go, too.

Brooke found out she was pregnant late on the night of Aug. 29, two days before the Texas Heartbeat Act banned abortions once an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity, around six weeks of pregnancy. It was the most restrictive abortion law to take effect in the United States in nearly 50 years.

Nearly 10 months into the Texas law, they have started having the babies they never planned to carry to term.

Texas offers a glimpse of what much of the country would face if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer, as has been widely expected since a leaked draft opinion circulated last month.

Sometimes Brooke imagined her life if she hadn’t gotten pregnant, if Texas hadn’t banned abortion just days after she decided that she wanted one. She would have been in school, rushing from class to her shift at Texas Roadhouse, eyes on a real estate license that would finally get her out of Corpus Christi. She’d pictured an apartment in Austin and enough money for a trip to Hawaii, where she’d swim with dolphins in water so clear she could see her toes.

When both babies finally started eating, Brooke took out her phone and restarted the timer that had been running almost continuously since the day they were born.

She had 2½ hours until they’d have to eat again.

Leaving Billy in her bedroom with the pregnancy test, Brooke grabbed her keys and drove to her best friend’s house, where they sat on his bed and examined her options.

She could always get an abortion, she told him.

Then he reminded her of something she vaguely remembered seeing on Twitter: A new law was scheduled to take effect Sept. 1.

Brooke had 48 hours.

The abortion clinic in South Texas — two and a half hours from Corpus Christi — had no open slots in the next two days, with patients across the state racing to get into clinics before the law came down. When Brooke called, the woman on the end of the line offered the names and addresses of clinics in New Mexico, a 13-hour drive from Corpus Christi.

In the meantime, the woman said, Brooke could get an ultrasound somewhere nearby: If she was under six weeks, they could still see her.

“We’re gonna see how far along it is,” Brooke texted her dad, Jeremy Alexander, later that night. “See if abortion is an option.”

“What’s the cut off date,” he asked.

“They just passed a law today!!” she responded in the early hours of Sept. 1, referring to the ban that had just taken effect. “What are the f---ing odds I believe it’s 6 weeks.”

“Fingers crossed????” her dad said.

Brooke found a place that would perform an ultrasound on short notice — and scheduled an appointment for 9 a.m.

Whenever a new client walks into the Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend, they are asked to fill out a form. After all the usual questions — name, date of birth, marital status — comes the one that most interests the staff: “If you are pregnant, what are your intentions?”

From there, the team sorts each client into one of three groups:\

If they’re planning to have the baby: “LTC,” likely to carry.

If they’re on the fence: “AV,” abortion vulnerable.

If they’re planning to get an abortion: “AM,” abortion minded.

The Pregnancy Center of the Coastal Bend — which advertises itself as the region’s “#1 Source of Abortion Information” — is one of thousands of crisis pregnancy centers across the United States, antiabortion organizations that are often religiously affiliated.

When Brooke showed up with her mom for her appointment, she had no idea she’d walked into a facility designed to dissuade people from getting abortions. She also didn’t know how much significance her form held for the staff: By signaling that she wanted an abortion, she became their first “AM” of the Texas Heartbeat Act.

The advocate assigned to her case, Angie Arnholt, had been counseling abortion-minded clients at the pregnancy center for a year. While many of the center’s volunteers signed up only to talk to “LTCs” — happy conversations about babies their clients couldn’t wait to have — Arnholt, a 61-year-old who wears a gold cross around her neck, felt called to do what she could to help women "make a good decision,” she later told The Washington Post.

Back in a consultation room, Brooke told Arnholt all the reasons she wanted to get an abortion.

She’d just enrolled in real estate classes at community college, which would be her first time back in a classroom since she dropped out of high school three years earlier at 15.

She and Billy had been dating only three months.

Sitting across from Brooke and her mom, Arnholt opened “A Woman’s Right to Know,” an antiabortion booklet distributed by the state of Texas, flipping to a page titled “Abortion risks.”

The first risk listed was “death.”

As Brooke listened to Arnholt’s warnings — of depression, nausea, cramping, breast cancer, infertility — she tried to stay calm, reminding herself that women get abortions all the time. Still, Brooke couldn’t help fixating on some of the words Arnholt used: Vacuum suction. Heavy bleeding. Punctured uterus. (Serious complications from abortion are rare. Abortion does not increase the risk of mental illness, breast cancer or infertility, according to leading medical organizations.)

Starting to panic, Brooke looked over at her mom.

Arnholt ushered Brooke into the ultrasound room, where Brooke undressed from the waist down and lay back onto an examination table, looking up at a large flat-screen TV.

As the ultrasound technician pressed the probe into her stomach, slathered with gel, Brooke willed the screen to show a fetus without a heartbeat.

The technician gasped.

It was twins. And they were 12 weeks along.

“Are you sure?” Brooke said.

“Oh, my God, oh, my God,” Thomas recalled saying as she jumped up and down. “This is a miracle from the Lord. We are having these babies.”

Brooke felt like she was floating above herself, watching the scene below. Her mom was calling the twins “my babies,” promising Brooke she would take care of everything, as the ultrasound technician told her how much she loved being a twin.

If she really tried, Brooke thought she could make it to New Mexico. Her older brother would probably lend her the money to get there. But she couldn’t stop staring at the pulsing yellow line on the ultrasound screen.

She wondered: If her babies had heartbeats, as these women said they did, was aborting them murder?

Eventually, Arnholt turned to Brooke and asked whether she’d be keeping them.

Brooke heard herself saying “yes.”  

Billy was scared to lose what he described as “the freedom of being a teenager.” After he graduated, he’d planned to keep working at Freebirds — just enough hours to get by — so he could maximize his skate time and “just chill.” People respected Billy at the skate park: Whenever he geared up to film some tricks, everyone else cleared out of the bowl.

By November, Billy was paying all of Brooke’s bills. She’d stopped working at Texas Roadhouse; the smell of the meat and grease had been making her sick to her stomach. To swing Brooke’s $330 car payment, they applied for a WIC card and ate ramen or pancakes for dinner. When they overdrafted Brooke’s credit card, Billy worked double shifts until he could pay it off.

Brooke wanted to work, but she couldn’t hack a waitressing job. At seven months pregnant, she struggled to stay on her feet for too long and felt utterly exhausted by even the simplest tasks. 

She started falling asleep while doing her homework. Then she missed a class. Then another.

When she decided to drop out of real estate school, she couldn’t bring herself to tell her teacher. She convinced herself it wasn’t that big of a deal — they’d be moving away soon anyway, and the Air Force would pay Billy enough to support them both.

Brooke wedged her real estate textbook in a line of books on her dresser, between “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” and the fourth Harry Potter.

Maybe she’d come back to it one day.

There you have it. Christians shamelessly lying directly out of their self-righteous mouths to con women into carrying fetuses to term that they did not want. God's sacred ends, justify filthy means. Brooke's life is probably over and those sanctimonious Christians are not going to do much or anything to help. 

This won't be the last like it. Some women will be happy they were conned or forced into carrying a fetus to birth, some won't and some will be ambivalent. Lots of lives will be derailed. Society will pay a price.

One thing that's pretty sure, those self-righteous Christians are not going to pay to support their cruel con game. And why should they? Us idiot taxpayers are forced to support Christianity with billions in tax breaks every year. And, despite Republican opposition to social safety net spending, us idiots also pay for the unwanted children the Christian con artists foist on society and the mothers who cannot afford to raise children on their own.