In the debate surrounding reproductive rights in Utah, advocates say there is a group being overlooked by many lawmakers and voters: those who have experienced stillbirth.
To some the topic feels taboo, but many women are hoping to change that.
Brittany Gibbons said she has a pain that falls between the cracks of the clear-cut beliefs many have about abortion.
"Here's black and here's white, and there's millions of us in the middle."
In 2014, she and her husband announced their first pregnancy at Christmas. A month later, everything changed.
"He just sat us down after that ultrasound and just said 'I'm so sorry, your baby is not going to make it.' But she was still alive,” she said.
Her baby had a heart block and would not survive. At 23 weeks Gibbons' doctor advised her to induce labor. She said at the time, she didn't realize that it was considered abortion.
She said she went to the hospital and cried while filling out the paperwork. That’s when her doctor came in, with tears in her own eyes. Her doctor told her she was new to Utah and didn’t know about the 72-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion.
"After I'm ready to do the hardest thing I could imagine doing. They pull the IV out of my arm and sent me home," said Gibbons.
Doctor Bob Silver is the Chair of the Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at University Of Utah Health.
“I think that there are some unintended consequences of some of these laws,” he said.
Dr. Silver has researched pregnancy loss for 40 years. He said with reproductive laws up in the air many patients and families are worried.
“Worried about the implications of those laws on their health and wellbeing. Especially families that have experienced stillbirth.”
As it stands now, abortions are currently legal in Utah before 18 weeks. The new Utah “trigger law,” to completely ban abortions, is on hold as it’s being challenged in court.
If passed the trigger law would prohibit abortion in all cases, except if the mother’s life is at risk, the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest, or if two specialists determine the fetus “has a defect that is uniformly diagnosable and uniformly lethal" or has a severe brain abnormality that is uniformly diagnosable.
While that law is held up, state lawmakers are drafting other abortion bills for next year’s legislative session. Dr. Silver said stillbirths aren’t often considered in these conversations, and they should be as this is an issue that impacts about one in every 170 pregnancies in Utah.
“It's more common than you think. And it's something that we see almost every day,” he said.
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He said abortion laws can create emotional hardships for stillbirth families and could make it harder to conduct stillbirth research.
"If those families can't do a delivery in their state but then they travel to another state to do that delivery, we may not capture that with our vital statistics," Silver said. "And so when we're trying to say, 'What are the causes of stillbirth and where should we focus our prevention efforts?' We may not have accurate data in order to be able to do that."
He says about one-third of stillbirths are preventable, prompting some advocates to ask why politicians don't focus on helping prevent those deaths.
"What's necessary is a national sense of urgency," said Allie Felker, with the group PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy.
The organization has a goal to reduce and eventually end preventable stillbirths. Felker said the legislature can play a role, like through the Shine for Autumn Act.
"That stands for the Stillbirth Health Improvement and Education Act," she said.
It's a bipartisan national bill that includes education campaigns, as well as more vital training for pathologists on stillbirth autopsies and data collection.
Stacey Fletcher gives peer to peer support for families that have lost a baby.
“I wish before these laws were passed that more parents would have a voice,” she said.
The laws impacting these families determine when they can deliver, what they can do with their baby’s body, or if their baby is eligible for a birth or death certificate.
“It's not simple, it's messy. So to say you're pro this or anti that there's a gray area that a lot of people don't even realize that families are having to deal with," Fletcher said.
For Gibbons, after a hard delivery she named her daughter Abby, and keeps her close to her and her family. She said even now, more than 8 years later, it's hard to talk about. But she said she feels she has to. For her, her story can't be reduced to a partisan talking point; it is reality.
“For a long time, I didn't think of myself as an abortion story, I thought of myself as a stillbirth story. Both taboo but very different,” Gibbons said. “And the reason that I think it's important to call it what it is. You know, legally I had an abortion, and I think that if people knew that and knew my story, they would think about that word differently."
Part two of this story airs Friday, Dec. 9 at 6:00 p.m. In that part we will look into how abortion laws impact stillbirth research, data collection, and prevention.