When people in the pro-life camp think about abortion, they think of ending a baby’s life. They think about a mother-to-be simply changing her mind and terminating a pregnancy. But it’s so much more complicated than that.

People don’t think about the other side of having choice. They don’t think about situations like mine. I desperately want a second baby but have had a fraught path with it. The fact that I have choices—medications and procedures available to me—has made an extremely difficult path at least a little bit easier to navigate.

This has been hell. But I’m grateful to have an intact healthcare system to guide me through it. I live in Washington. Women in other states aren’t so lucky.

I’ve had seven miscarriages. Seven unviable pregnancies. Seven false hopes. Seven heartbreaks. Three of those ended in D&Cs, also known as dilation and curettage, a procedure in which one’s uterine lining is scraped away. For someone like me who desperately wants a baby, this is the absolute last way I’d want to spend my day. But there are reasons to make this choice. Thank goodness I have a choice.

Two of those procedures were my choice. Each time, my doctor told me the pregnancy wasn’t viable. I could either go through the loss naturally, probably beginning the bleeding within a week or two, though it might not happen and I’d have to have a D&C anyway. Or I could just get it over with. Knowing that they were 100 percent not-viable pregnancies and that I was feeling like shit—morning sickness, nausea, exhaustion, having all the terrible pregnancy stuff but without a baby inside of me—why would I linger with it when I could get a procedure done quickly? That allowed me to not only move on from the physical suffering, but I could work through the mental and emotional aspect of grieving the loss and accepting it.

Let’s be clear: Pregnancy is not a walk in the park. The only thing that makes the bodily discomfort endurable—the puking, the fatigue, the soreness—is knowing that it’s all for a good cause. For that baby you want so badly. Without that shining hope inside of you, it is nothing more than illness. One long, lingering affliction with no foreseeable respite. It is a painful shadow existence of what could have been but is not.

Why should a woman have to reside in that terrible limbo state?

However, there are even more pressing reasons to end a pregnancy. The most significant loss for me in terms of having choices was my ectopic pregnancy. That’s where an embryo begins developing outside the uterus, usually in a woman’s fallopian tube. I had a D&C for that because the doctors couldn’t find the pregnancy. This way, they could ensure that the pregnancy wasn’t in my uterus and then treat what was really going on. Once the doctors determined the pregnancy was ectopic, treatment was a matter of urgency.

I was immediately given methotrexate to end the pregnancy. Without that medication, my life would have been at risk. Ectopic pregnancies are dangerous anyway—a ruptured fallopian tube is no small matter—but delaying the use of medication and ensuring that invasive surgery would be necessary is nothing short of cruel. I was grateful that it was easy for me, that my doctor acted immediately. Although it was horrible, it saved me from having my tube rupture and potentially dying.

It makes me think of the woman in Texas recently who had an ectopic pregnancy. Her doctor wouldn’t write the methotrexate prescription for fear of legal repercussions. She went to the hospital, and they denied her care, too. She ended up having to drive twelve hours to New Mexico for treatment. Because of the changing climate around abortion—and her doctor’s resultant fear—she could have died.

Are we really privileging unviable embryos above living, breathing women?

When it comes to ectopic pregnancy, anti-abortion advocates are saying no one is going to deny a woman life-saving surgery. Just let the pregnancy progress and deal with an emergency if it comes up, they say. But the major thing to think about is that the life-saving surgery is also a life-threatening event. And it can be prevented with medications. Medications are safer and less invasive. A woman may remain healthy and terminate her unviable pregnancy rather than waiting to be on the brink of catastrophe before taking action.

If my fallopian tube had been allowed to rupture, how much harder would my path to pregnancy be? I am trying to have a child. Having reproductive choices is supporting me in that endeavor. Having D&Cs and methotrexate available to me is helping me to bring a healthy life into this world. That’s all I want. I want my second child with all my heart, but my body must be healthy and intact to do so.

I am grateful to live in a state that is pro-choice. Those choices are allowing me to choose life. Both mine and that of my future child.