Speaking out from South Dakota: Keep Families’ Health Care Decisions in Families’ Hands

Contributed by Tiffany Campbell, Spokesperson for South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families
The right of families to make decisions about their own private health care is under attack in South Dakota, where I live with my husband, Chris, and our three children. These agonizing decisions would be seized by bureaucrats and lawyers if Measure 11 — another sweeping abortion ban like the one that South Dakota voters rejected decisively in 2006 — passes this November.
Why did Chris and I decide to have an abortion?
Two years ago, in the midst of that first, intense battle to ban abortion here in South Dakota, we learned that we were pregnant with identical twins. We were overjoyed.
But then we learned that our sons were suffering from a severe case of Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome. That’s a condition where twins unequally share blood circulation. It meant that one boy was receiving too much blood resulting in a strained heart and acute risk of heart failure. Meanwhile, his brother was clinging to life, but his blood supply was insufficient to sustain normal development. This is an affliction where if one twin dies, the other faces significant risk of death.
So we were faced with an awful situation that forced us to examine our most fundamental moral and spiritual beliefs. At first we just didn’t want to believe the doctors’ prognosis. We wanted so badly for our boys to win the fight. But we couldn’t stay on the sidelines forever: against all of our hopes and prayers, our twins’ conditions continued to deteriorate quickly.
This was the most difficult decision of our lives. We could let nature run its course and pray that by the grace of God our boys would miraculously survive, or we could abort the sicker of the two, giving his brother a legitimate shot at life.

We decided to abort one of our sons. Our decision was predicated on consultation with experts in the field of fetal medicine, our personal beliefs, prayer, and a mother’s intuition.
Today we have a healthy twenty-month-old boy who is the treasure of his older brother and sister. He’s the family jester, the optimist, the one with a quick smile and a contagious giggle. It’s like he made a pact with his twin brother to live passionately — to live for both of them in honor of the spirit of his fallen brother.
This was an excruciating decision for us to make. But it would have been unimaginably worse if our decision had been criminalized. Under Measure 11, we would have been forced to go through weekly ultrasounds where we watched the progressive withering of one twin’s body and the deterioration of the other twin’s heart.
If they have their way, the extremists peddling South Dakota’s Measure 11 would strip us of our decision, and would seize this same decision from every other woman and family in America.
Everyday our youngest son’s contagious giggle reminds us that we made the right decision for our family. Let God be our judge.
As one of the extremists’ national strategists said, Measure 11 is just the first step towards their “goal of an abortion-free America.” To learn more about what you can do to keep bureaucrats and Government lawyers out of women’s exam rooms, go to www.SDHealthyFamilies.org. Because if Measure 11 passes, it will have consequences echoing far beyond South Dakota.