I’ve lived in New York for eight years and love it here. But for several reasons I’ve stayed loyal to a single doctor in my hometown of Dallas: my OB-GYN. She’s a straight shooter with an incredible bedside manner cut with a pitch-perfect dry sense of humour. And when you have somebody essentially taking a straw cleaner to your insides, she’s the exact vibe you want in the room.
There are grown-up versions of the “Hang in there!” kitten poster hung throughout the office setting. If you have abnormal cells from a pap smear, hinting at HPV? Don’t worry until the biopsy comes back. Dense breast tissue? She’s immediately mapping out a 10-year mammogram plan with you. She was also one of the first doctors who ever asked if I wanted to be weighed – and as a straight-sized patient, I thought this was the coolest for my friends who feel patronised by the medical community because of a number on the scale. See why I’m hesitant to find somebody new?
When I met my fiancé, I was 31 and we immediately started talking about freezing my eggs. There are a lot of complications around this topic for me – my mother died of colon cancer more than a decade ago, my father died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis just two weeks ago – and I want to make sure I’m not at risk of passing along those genes to future generations, which means a lot of additional screening for both me and the potential eggs involved.
Last year, when I was in Dallas for my annual check-up, I brought up my desire to freeze my eggs – or, more likely, embryos, with my fiancé’s genetic material involved. To be honest, doing it in Texas mostly appealed to me since I already pay the ridiculous Manhattan rent for myself, and I realised the freezer rent for said eggs is way cheaper in the South. But my doctor stopped me immediately. “First of all, everything looks good and you still have time,” she said, lighting up my now 33-year-old, soon-geriatric-pregnancy heart. “But I want to touch on something important. You don’t know what rights these eggs or embryos will have in even a year. They might have more rights than a woman one day.”
At the time, her words shocked me and seemed totally unrealistic, but they have felt completely prophetic since I heard of the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision that fertilised eggs sitting in a freezer can have the same rights as children. For mothers who underwent the egg-freezing process in that state, this means that any frozen embryo, regardless of time spent on ice, is now viewed as a child and cannot be destroyed.
Texas governor Greg Abbott weighed in, telling CNN that while the state was pro-IVF and “we want to make it easier for people to be able to have babies,” it’s also “a pro-life state.” I’m not interested in being cautiously optimistic here. The writing’s on the wall, and I am so grateful I listened to my doctor’s advice and didn’t follow through with freezing my eggs in Texas. After more counselling through my Dallas-based OB-GYN, I decided to undergo intense genetic testing upfront to fully understand what genes I would potentially pass on to my future genetic children. From there, if anything alarming shows up, we’ll decide how to proceed.
When I left Dallas, my dad told me he got concerned calls. “Aren’t you worried about her being around all those liberals,” people asked – joking, I’m sure, but also a little bit curious. “No,” he replied proudly. “Because she’s known she was one since fifth grade.”
I’ve finally realised it’s time to make the full commitment to New York City, which includes finding an OB-GYN in the state that supports a woman’s right to have as many children as she wants. And while I’ll miss my Dallas-based doctor – who truly cares for her patients and upholds the Hippocratic Oath – if you have a recommendation for a doctor you love, I’m all ears.