Tasha: Forever Changed

My story like everyone else’s, is very unique. It also has a controversial topic related with it, abortion and selective reduction. My husband and I used a medication called Clomid in order to get pregnant. I do not ovulate on my own so we knew this was our first step in starting a family. We were shocked when I got pregnant the first month. My pregnancy started out quite normal, I was sick and tired but I was happy. When we had our first appointment at 8 weeks we were shocked to find out that I was pregnant with quadruplets. I remember laughing in the doctor’s office because I just couldn’t believe that I had four babies growing inside me. Then reality set in. How was I going to carry four babies? Would they survive? Would I survive?

We were faced with the absolute most difficult decision of our lives, try to carry quads or reduce to twins. We took a week to make our decision. It was the longest and most difficult week of my life (up until that point at least).  We were given so many statistics and hypotheticals that I probably couldn’t repeat any of them back to you if I tried. The bottom line was it was more likely that all the babies would die rather than all of them live. I would be hospitalized by 20ish weeks and the babies would be lucky to be born after 28 weeks. I knew that the chance of them surviving was little. Of course you hear of all the miracle stories where quads survive and everything is fine, but that is only half of it. Most people are not that lucky. Those are the exceptions, not the rules.  We made the seemingly impossible decision to end two of our babies’ lives in order to give the other two babies a better chance of survival.

I have so much guilt and I still wonder if we made the right decision. Of course I have had some judgment from others and honestly that is okay with me. I know that with the facts we had, we made the right choice. It is easy to judge from the outside but until you are faced with that kind of decision, you have no idea what you will do.

A week after the reduction we found out that one of the babies heart had stopped. I was devastated. At this point I was 13 weeks along and just hoped that everything would go smoothly from there. I kept thinking that we had already gone through so much that we could not possibly lose the last baby. That would just be too cruel. The only thing that was getting me through was the fact that we still had one baby to look forward too. We began planning like any other expecting parents. We planned the nursery, work, and picking out a name. I had been having other complications and was being closely monitored by my doctors. However, at exactly 19 weeks I began having contractions. This was not the first time so I was hoping it was just another false alarm. We went to the hospital just in case and just a few hours later we were informed that the placenta was detaching and the baby would be born and that he would not survive. I remember feeling like I was underwater when she said that. All I could think was “no!” This could not be happening. We had already been through so much, he couldn’t die too.

At 11:42 on October 5, 2012 I gave birth to our sweet angel baby Maddox Moore. He was absolutely perfect. He had my mouth and nose, and his dad’s beautiful shaped eyes. I am so proud to be his mom and I am so glad that I got the time with him that I did. I would go through it all again if that meant being able to hold him one more time.

I go through our decisions all the time and I wonder if we did the right thing. I know that many people will say that what we did was wrong or that they would have never been able to do what we did and others will agree that they would have done the same thing. I know that we will always wonder what would have happened had we not done the reduction. I also know that had we lost all four babies later in the pregnancy that would have been just as awful. I would have then wished we had done the reduction. I will never know what would have happened but I do know that I have to accept the decision we made and be thankful for the time we had with Maddox and the other babies we never got to meet.

You can read more about Tasha's story on her blog Forever Changed.