Part 1: The Viability Line

Choose to lean into it. Every Mazda is engineered to give you effortless control. I wake up. Wix. It's where website creation meets AI and where your boldest ideas become real. It just takes one platform to build a site that looks great and does everything you need it to. And it just takes one person, you, to start taking care of business like a 10 person team. With AI tools for creating an entire website from scratch or testing new ways to make money, Wix is there with you from day one. Try it out now at wix.com. Listener supported, WNYC Studios. A heads up, this episode starts with a story of pregnancy loss. I'm Julia Longoria. This is More Perfect. How old were you when you got pregnant for the first time? Today's episode comes from producer Gabrielle Berbey. I was 30, 34. I was 34. And it starts with a woman named Margo. She's never set foot in the Supreme Court. But in 2014, when Roe v. Wade was still law, her first pregnancy made her confront a line the court drew. That story began when she was about nine weeks pregnant. So at nine weeks, was when I started writing weekly letters to my baby. What kind of stuff would you write? I think I talked about snapdragons and how you can make them open like mouths. And so how excited I was to, you know, like, show her how to do that, how you when you squeeze the sides of snapdragons' mouths, you can make them talk. I kept up the the the weekly letters until I ran out of pages in that journal. Then at eighteen weeks, the trouble began. One of the ventricles in her brain was measuring on the high side of the normal range. The scan showed that something was wrong with her baby's brain development. So doctors asked her to come back in a few weeks for a follow-up scan. By twenty two weeks, it was in the severe range, and there were other abnormalities. When somebody brought up abortion, that made it clear to me that what was going on was real bad. I mean, every one of them knew that I wanted that baby. They knew there was a chance her baby had a rare congenital brain disease. But it was too early for a diagnosis, and they didn't know how severe it would be. The big thing that we were waiting for at that point was the information that the MRI could give us about the brain development a month down the line. In one month, scans could tell her a lot more about her baby's quality of life. Either the complications were so great that she would die before she was born or immediately after birth or never leave a hospital kind of stuff, and they just couldn't say at that point. But the problem was, in a month, it would be too late. I was …