An anti-abortion influencer insists she'll continue her high-risk ectopic pregnancy
This won't end well.
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Alex Gooding is one of those #TradWives who constantly posts about her ever-growing family. She has seven kids (“& 6 in heaven”). Her identity boils down to being a proud “Christian Mom of Many” under the Orthodox Christian Church umbrella.
Her family is about to grow larger by one, with “Chloe Marie” on the way in a few months… but there’s a serious complication. Doctors have told her this is a Cesarean Scar Ectopic Pregnancy (CSEP), a rare condition in which the embryo implants inside the scar tissue left over from a previous C-section (as opposed to more common—but also dangerous—ectopic pregnancies which occur in the fallopian tubes).
What’s important to know is that these types of pregnancies are almost never viable. Without surgically or medically removing the embryo, a mother’s life is in serious danger, as one medical website noted:
The scar tissue is not as strong as the uterine wall and can tear and may result in hemorrhage. The placenta will grow in the wrong place, causing bleeding and potentially leading to a hysterectomy, damage to surrounding organs, or death of the pregnant patient.
Terminating the pregnancy is the best way to protect the woman and avoid catastrophic problems down the line.
But Alex Gooding is a conservative who thinks abortion is evil, so she says she plans to continue the pregnancy, despite the advice of her doctor who apparently tried everything he could to knock some sense into her.
When I finally saw the [ultrasound] pictures it was very crushing. It was obvious that baby had implanted into my scar. I started researching that day and over the weekend found 2 Facebook groups, every article I could get my hands on, stories from survivors on YouTube and more.
I asked my midwife for a 2nd opinion referral to a different mfm. Which she did happily but they could not get my in until I was 7 weeks.
We came back to my midwife the following week when I was 6w3d. Matt and I were met with some hostility by the OB. He told me 1) that my baby would probably die anyway because her heartbeat was 114 and she was measuring 2-3 days behind (which is perfectly normal btw) and 2) when I told him I wouldn’t be killing my baby today, he turned to Matt only and told him he has to make me terminate then. This was not a good experience and honestly I have zero respect for how he treated us that day.
That kind of response isn’t just infuriating; it’s selfish. The doctor was giving them the sad truth: The baby will almost certainly not survive, and there’s a good chance Alex won’t make it either. And they responded… by getting mad at the doctor.
Beyond that, it seems cruel to continue a pregnancy that could leave your other seven children without a parent due entirely to your own ignorance and stubbornness.
Because Alex is an influencer, though, the situation is made even worse because of survivorship bias. She doesn’t seem to understand that there’s a reason she’s hearing from other women who have survived ectopic pregnancies.
She’s hearing from “more survivors than not,” everyone! It’s a miracle!
Or maybe—and I know this may come as a shock to her—it’s literally impossible to hear from people who died from pregnancy complications. She refuses to consider how many other pregnant people in her situation didn’t make it. Instead, she smiles for the camera, not giving a damn about the kids she already has.
There’s nothing brave about continuing a pregnancy this risky. She’s not a role model for other women.
This is a prime example of why even most “pro-life” people say there should be exceptions “for the life of the mother.” A 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center found that, among Americans who believe abortion should be illegal in “most” or “all” cases, nearly half of them (46%) still said abortion should be an option if a woman’s life or health were in jeopardy. Another 27% said it depended on the situation. A situation like this one, in other words, might sway even the most fervent anti-abortion zealots.
All this from someone who admits she has a history of high-risk pregnancies and supports candidates who would remove choice as an option from anyone who’s pregnant—with no exceptions.
She’s lucky, in a way, that it’s not too late to choose a wiser path. She doesn’t have to do the thing she insists she’s going to do.
There is another concern, too. If everything works out as well as it possibly could, and the baby and mother survive, her advocacy would only discourage others in her situation from making the tragic but safer decision. Her survival could lead to more suffering for others. That’s not to say I want her to suffer. I hope everything works out for them. But instead of using her platform responsibly, and explaining to her followers that there are situations when even staunch abortion opponents might want to consider some nuance, she’s pitching herself as a martyr for the cause, as if it’s her versus the medical establishment.
The same medical establishment that, ironically, helped her bear other children through IVF, a process she now rejects as immoral.
In any case, congratulations to the eldest girl in the family, who may soon have to take over all of the child-rearing and household responsibilities because her mother wants to play Russian Roulette with her body and there’s no reason to think the father will help raise the kids. Nothing about this screams “choosing life.” It just sends the message that she’s more interested in giving birth than raising the family she already has.
As several online commenters pointed out, this continues a pernicious mindset that ramped up during the pandemic, where some people decided to follow their “own research” over solid medical advice that revealed how wrong they were. They would rather die to “own the libs” than take solid advice that might contradict their pre-existing beliefs. What a mistake.
She evidently has more concern for the tiny cluster of nonviable cells growing in the wrong place than she does her seven living children. In my view having seven children in this day and age isn't responsible behavior either. The world does not suffer from a lack of people. It doesn't say if she's a part of the obscene 'Quiver Full' movement which seeks to breed an army of Christian zealots to take over the world, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me. Christians tend to attribute all that's good with the world to their God and religion, while ignoring the countless horrors perpetrated by religious people in the name of their religion. All the world's evil is the fault of everyone who doesn't think they way they do.
I was just thinking about this subject on the way to work. Pretty much every ectopic pregnancy, by the time the situation is recognized the development of both the placenta and the zef have been compromised beyond recovery. That zef is not viable whether it still has a heartbeat or not. The doctor has already noticed the developmental deficiencies in the fetus here, but she writes it off as perfectly normal, it is not. And it will only get worse as the pregnancy progresses. Of course she could survive but it is less likely. And I don’t believe her when she says she has seen many stories of both the mother and baby surviving an entire pregnancy like this. If I had time, I’d check it out for myself, but since she wasn’t willing to prove it herself, I don’t believe her. (There may be a handful, I’ll admit that much only because of the law of probability not that she’s actually found any.)
I was also thinking about the stories of women who have in the past and are now going through it again with the new draconian murder women laws where the fetus is unviable, dead, except for some faint heartbeats detected, and the woman is actively bleeding out and suffering from sepsis and other health catastrophe who are turned away until the fetus is “officially dead”. What is the thinking here? You aren’t trying to save the fetus, you don’t even have any intervention that you could do to save the fetus, it is going to die no matter what you do, it’s not going to suddenly get better in the parking lot all by itself. So why are you not doing everything you can to save the actual person in front of you who has interventions available that can save them? I hear that the forced birther, women murderers, don’t want to actively kill the baby, leave it to godswill, but that isn’t what’s happening n these situations. The fetus is dead, there’s no coming back from its situation, it just has some residual electrical impulses in tiny cells (that offend haven’t even developed into the actual organ yet) it won’t survive, aborting at this point is not killing anything. But you are actively killing the person carrying the fetus. Your lack of action is action when you are able to help, to intervene. Her blood is on your hands. If you claim dying for a doomed pregnancy is godswill, then when you’re diagnosed with cancer or other deadly but treatable diseases, we could withhold care from you claiming godswill just as gladly. No other medical crisis is ever ignored because of godswill and none should be, including doomed pregnancies with a detectable fetal heartbeat. I don’t see the rationale of forcing women to bleed out or die from sepsis to save the fetus that’s never going to make it. Aside from rejoicing in another woman’s death, there’s no there, there.