Beyond limits Stories of third-trimester abortion care

Sella, the first woman to openly perform third-trimester abortions in the U.S., reflects on her career and debunks antiabortion myths in her empathetic debut. Sella lays out the two types of patients who seek late-term abortions: patients who've learned their fetuses have extreme abnormalities, and those who end their pregnancies "because of severe challenges and complications they and their families face." She tells the stories of three of each type of patient who visited her practice in Albuquerque over the course of a week, among them Mary, who had antiabortion views before going through IVF in her early 40s and discovering that her baby had a neural tube defect; Laura, a mother of four whose husband abused her; and Irene, whose cancer had returned and who couldn't start chemotherapy while pregnant. Sella also recounts how a devastating sexual assault she experienced as a child and the pregnancy scare that followed influenced her career: after college, she volunteered in abortion care, eventually going to medical school and training under George Tiller, a third-trimester abortion provider in Kansas who was assassinated by antiabortion protesters in 2009. Sella does a stellar job of straightforwardly and compassionately explaining why third-trimester abortions happen: "Third-trimester abortions are rare," she writes, "but the situations that drive women to seek them are not." This bursts with insight. (June)