Holding fast in a high-risk pregnancy, Part 1

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, October 4th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Today on Concurrently: The News Coach Podcast, Kelsey Reed interviews Doug Shepherd, a church planter in Ukraine. And they talk about the challenges of church and family in a time of war. Here’s a preview of their conversation.

REED: And that pivots me towards this question about what the immediate changes were for your family and for family life in general and ministry, due to this invasion?

SHEPHERD: Everything just went crazy once the invasion happened. You have half the population saying, "I can't believe this is going on." My wife was in that group, like "What? I can't believe they would, what are they thinking?" And then they start bombing the cities, and so people start moving west. So it took people maybe three days to get here, the shelter can take so many, everyone opens up their home like good Christians. But we've got people living in our house who are massively traumatized. And as a parent, a lot of the parental work is calibrating the fallen world to where the age and stage of the child is, and having conversations that are appropriate, trying to fight against your parental instinct to prevent pain. You want them to deal with the painful world, but you want to calibrate it to what they can process. Well, when people that are massively traumatized and highly anxious move into the house, and the air raid alarm goes off, so when that happens, people that are guests in our house, fall on the floor, start wailing, the kids are saying we're gonna die. You can't pull your 11-year-old aside and go you know, "Let's, let's talk about it." You just have to get together with your wife and recalibrate, like "What are we supposed to do here?"

You can listen to the full episode in the Concurrently podcast feed … and we’ve included a link in today’s show notes.

REICHARD: Well, speaking of how trauma tests a person’s faith, pregnancy is an area of life that can be filled with pain and anguish. So what to do about difficult pregnancies?

Last month, three Tennessee women sued their state over its laws protecting babies from abortion. They said those laws forced them to continue traumatic pregnancies that put their health at risk.

Some doctors are making similar claims. Leilah Zahedi-Spung was a high-risk obstetrician in Chattanooga, Tennessee, until last winter. Sound here from KUSA 9News in Denver:

NEWS ANCHOR: But when the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, a Tennessee law made the care she provided illegal and forced her to send patients away or risk a felony charge.

LEILAH ZAHEDI-SPUNG: I couldn't do it. So now there's no one there. And that causes a lot of guilt.

EICHER: Dr. Zahedi-Spung moved to take a job in Colorado and left behind high-risk patients, women with complicated pregnancies. Since this spring, WORLD’s life beat reporter Leah Savas has been in contact with one of those patients. And while the circumstances were difficult, this woman had a different view of her pregnancy complications.

LEAH SAVAS, REPORTER: It’s July 30th, 2022. Steve and Ashley Gillmore sit on the brown suede couch in their living room. Both have children on their laps: a wiggly little boy on Steve’s lap and a little girl with glasses on Ashley’s. Their three other daughters sit next to them—all posing for a family picture.

ASHLEY: Alright, everybody look at the camera and say, “Mom’s pregnant!”

DAUGHTERS: What? What?

With five kids, ages two to eleven, Steve and Ashley thought they were done after their youngest graduated from diapers. So all the baby stuff went to other pregnant moms, the crib, the stroller, car seat, clothes. Everything except for the high chair.

RELATIVE: Judah, did you hear what your mom said?

LILY: I told you you would have another baby!

DAUGHTER 2: Mommy’s pregnant! Mommy’s having another baby!

This is the story of that surprise pregnancy—how it challenged Ashley’s faith and the medical community’s commonly accepted view of how to handle a complicated pregnancy.

Ashley was 35 when she found out about the baby. At first, everything seemed normal. Until one night when Ashley was around 10 weeks.

ASHLEY: I woke up in the middle of the night just with massive bleeding and thought I for certain was having a miscarriage, like blood down to my ankles just drenched in blood.

Doctors diagnosed her with a subchorionic hemorrhage. That’s when the placenta partially detaches from the uterus, causing bleeding. It can heal on its own. But that was just the beginning of the bad news.

When Ashley was 14 weeks along, another test showed she had placenta accrete, a condition where the baby’s placenta grows too deeply into the uterine wall. That can cause life-threatening bleeding during delivery. Steve and Ashley left the appointment confused. They sat in their car in the parking lot and pulled out their phones.

ASHLEY: Anything you read about on accrete talks about mortality rates and how rare it is that a baby will survive and how dangerous it is for the mother and possibility that the mother won't survive. So we just felt like we were like spinning like what, where do we even go from here?

During one of many follow-up appointments, Ashley and Steve watched the baby moving around on the ultrasound screen.

SOUND: [Heartbeat]

The baby was 18 weeks along, apparently healthy despite the complications. The little heartbeat was strong. So what the doctor said to them next was jarring.

ASHLEY: The placenta has breached your uterine wall. And she said, from the ultrasound, we can't tell if it's already invading into your bladder. And she just tried to stress the concern that she wasn't certain how much longer my body would survive going through the process that was happening. She said it would be you know, it's illegal in our state, but we would deem it medically necessary, making an abortion legal for you. And I could tell you where to go to have that done today.

That doctor was Leilah Zahedi-Spung.  She later made headlines for moving out of the state because of Tennessee’s pro-life laws.

Ashley and Steve were scared. They felt numb. It seemed like she was telling them abortion was their only option. But they pushed back.

ASHLEY: How could we choose to abort our baby when we just have seen that he's healthy?

It would be a long six weeks ahead of them before the baby would be viable outside the womb. Still, Ashley and Steve said they wanted to try. Right after that appointment at the clinic, they headed for the hospital.

Hospital staff put Ashley on bedrest in the high-risk pregnancy unit.

MUSIC: [“Remembrance”]

Throughout the pregnancy, doctors said it wasn’t certain Ashley would have an emergency…but if she did, she likely wouldn’t survive. Ashley and Steve wondered what God could possibly be trying to do through this. But Ashley prayed that the Lord would change her perspective.

ASHLEY: Not to just keep continuing to question why are we doing this, but to look for ways to say, God put this in our life so that we could have the chance to tell this many more people how amazing he is and what his plan could be through all of this.

And looking back, Ashley could see how God had used previous trials to prepare her for this one. Through the unexpected death of her mother-in-law in 2021, Ashley learned to trust God’s goodness even when you lose someone you love. It prepared her to trust God even if the baby died. Even if it meant she would die.

ASHLEY: No matter what the outcome of all of this, the truth would still be that he's a good God. And whether it was all of us or whether it was just me and our baby did pass, or whether it was just my husband and kids, and they would have to be sustained through him.

After just a few days in the hospital, her bleeding slowed down. Doctors let her finish her bedrest at home. She surprised her kids when she came home earlier than expected. They ran to hug her when she walked through the front door.

SOUND: [Walking in Front Door]

JUDAH: Mom? Mommy!

OLIVIA: Mommy!

ASHLEY: Don’t knock me over.

DAUGHTERS: Momma!

For weeks, Ashley camped out on the soft brown couch in their living room. She went in for check-ins and steroid injections to help the baby’s lungs grow. The pregnancy continued past the 24-week mark. At that point, the baby was more likely to survive outside of the womb. But the invasive placenta wasn’t getting any better.

ASHLEY: We still wondered if how invasive into my bladder it was going to be. What it was going to do to any of my other organs was never really certain.

MUSIC [“A Kind of Light”]

Meanwhile, Ashley prepared for the possibility that she might not make it through this. She wrote notes to Steve, to their extended family. She wrote to her kids.

ASHLEY: Enjoy life to its fullest. Don't let little stuff tear you apart. But most of all, be bold in your faith. And don't let other people tell you who you need to be. Know that we are here—you without me—because of my love for my children. And it was just too big to allow someone to tell me that it wasn’t possible.

She kept the notes on her phone and didn’t tell anyone.

Then, one day short of 29 weeks, after more than ten weeks on bedrest, her water broke.

REICHARD: Tomorrow, part two of this story. Plus, a visit to the family’s home in Chattanooga.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.