Retired Catholic perinatal nurse explains how abortion laws have shifted her views

A devout Catholic, Tammy Ruiz Ziegler worked for 39 years as a registered nurse and a bereavement nurse, specializing in perinatal loss. She’s also trained as a hospital chaplain and was one of the first in her field to work in perinatal hospice and palliative care, that is, care for a patient who chooses to carry a pregnancy to term following a diagnosis that their fetus will die before or shortly after birth.

For many years, Ziegler explained, terminating a pregnancy was the only intervention offered to women whose babies had been prenatally diagnosed with fatal conditions. Some patients, but not all, were OK with that practice, she said.

“It is strange now to try to teach people about this care when our culture is (in some places) teetering on revoking the option which was offered as the only option for so many years,” Ziegler said by email. She said that she doesn’t believe the option of perinatal palliative care should be forced on patients, however.

Many who are against abortion are afraid that babies who have been diagnosed with prenatal fatal conditions could be undertreated because their births are seen “through the lens of ‘abortion,'” Ziegler said.

“There are misconceptions about this care from both ideological camps,” Ziegler said. “I have heard advocates of this care say that there are no risks, yet there are some pregnancy complications that happen at a higher rate with sick babies — so expert obstetric care is a must which might include preterm deliveries. Conversely, I have read criticisms of this care model that say these babies suffer and their experiences are a cruelty by parents and providers. Palliative care at its core has the goal of comfort and expert providers are tasked with ensuring the baby’s comfort.”

Ziegler wishes that more community hospitals would offer perinatal palliative care. Currently, only about 370 hospitals, hospices, and community-based organizations worldwide offer this specialized care to patients.

For years, Ziegler said, she felt that it was ethically correct for a woman to keep her pregnancy and deliver the baby into palliative care in place, even when it might not survive.

She said her views changed in 2006 after one of her patients was given the news that her fetus would not survive a full 40-week pregnancy. The patient decided to deliver the fetus at 24 weeks, even though Ziegler felt that inducing labor that early was equivalent to an abortion and that it  should be induced two weeks later.

The woman decided to move forward with the 24-week induction. Ziegler later learned that the woman’s husband had died two weeks following the delivery. “I thought to myself, if that woman had asked me what she should do, I would have told her to wait two weeks, and she would have lost her baby and her husband on nearly the same day,” Ziegler said in an interview with the American Independent. 

“I was like, You know what? This is so not my business to make any decisions for anybody.“ I am going to support whatever people decide for themselves because obviously, I don’t have any magical sense of the future that’s going to be really helpful to people. So that was the last of me thinking that this is the best thing for everybody.”

Ziegler’s personal experience has had an impact on her views as well. In 1992, Ziegler suffered a miscarriage at 9 weeks and went to the hospital hemorrhaging.

“I look back on that and it was scary and sad enough — I cannot imagine how much worse it would have been to be turned away at the emergency room and sent home to get sicker,” Ziegler said.

Ziegler said after working shoulder-to-shoulder with physicians who treat pregnancy loss, she feels she’s become what she calls “pro-trust.” “I trust women and their doctors to do the right things for the right reasons in the right moment,” she said.

Ziegler said that her views are seen by some other Christians as “a little volatile.”

“From a true, true, deep Christian point of view, I think that God loved George Floyd as much as he loves babies that aren’t born,” she said. “I think that life is precious, but life is really precious in all its forms, not just an infant. I think sometimes the Christians that I’m close to, who are very vocally pro-life, they seem to really believe that some forms of life are more important than others, and I don’t think I believe that.”