Pregnant cancer patients often have to terminate. Abortion pill restrictions could make that choice even harder
WASHINGTON — The patient had already made the agonizing decision to start chemotherapy to address her colon cancer, even though she was 30 weeks pregnant. Within a day, the decisions got harder: her colon perforated, and the pain was excruciating. She would need urgent surgery — and she would have to undergo an emergency C-section immediately.
“She looked me in the eye, and she said, ‘I have two children that need me, and if you have to make a decision, I need you to remember that. That my little girls need me, the two kids I already have need me,’” said her oncologist, Katherine Van Loon, who specializes in treating gastrointestinal cancers at the University of California, San Francisco.
