Like so many people right now, the decision to have a second child is as much about whether or not we could afford another kid. This conversation has raised an issue I haven't thought about in years: ohgod what would we do if I got pregnant?
Let me be clear. I love being a mother, even all the pain in the ass parts like not going to see music like I used to, rolling the dice every night for a full-night's sleep, all of it. Without my son there would be no Hegemommy. But, for the first time in at least a decade, the theoretical possibility of abortion has entered my universe. Even typing that feels surreal.
Abortion is an issue that makes me exceptionally uncomfortable, one that I've refrained from writing about on this site and in my other work. I hate the tired rhetoric from both camps but I don't see a clear resolution of the issue. Yet I am firmly pro-choice, and my current situation is exactly why. It's a topic that just plain sucks.
The reality is that the tipping point in the decision to expand our family is cost: cost of pregnancy/delivery, cost of raising another child, and cost to the family we've already built. As much as we hate money to be the driving factor of the analysis, it is. The hospital bill for a second child would be around $20,000, and that is AFTER our $5800 deductible and the $600/month premium payments. Putting another child in day care would increase our childcare costs to approximately $3000/month. Those costs don't even factor in any loss of my income, even temporarily. When we started to do the math the numbers simply stunned us.
But, despite those numbers, we were bound and determined NOT to have this decision essentially taken out of our hands or come down to counting beans. So, we did the responsible thing and started shopping around for additional insurance and considering alternatives to our current childcare situation. Thankfully for us the childcare situation was an easier work-around now that I'm essentially self-employed. At the very least, it looked like we had options.
Not so for insurance. Since I'm a member of the bar association my family and I qualify for insurance through that membership. At first this looked like a real possibility, and I thought that, should we decide to have a second child, we had gotten our ducks in a row and could pull it off financially. That was until the agent asked us directly if we planned on having other kid. I stalled because, well, I didn't have a good answer to that question. At the time we were neither planning to or not, we were just figuring out the possibility of it all. It seemed to me the reasonable, and indeed responsible way to go about family planning, especially in a recession.
Unfortunately our responsibility was met with the news that only some insurance plans would cover pregnancy/childbirth, and those that do have an 18 month waiting period to get pregnant- not have a child- but conceive a child. Did I want a toddler in my early 40's? Would that even be healthy? My son would be almost 8 years older than his sibling by the time s/he was born. When we imagined our family expanding this was not at all the picture we had in mind.
Here's the real crime. If those costs did not exist, I would not be writing this post. I'm not saying we would have committed to having a second child, I'm just saying that the possibility of pregnancy would not induce a panic attack. If the costs weren't there an accidental conception would simply be a surprise. We hear that millions of Americans, even those with health insurance, are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy, and here's why.
If we keep our current coverage, we cannot afford the bills related to pregnancy and delivery. If we switch coverage we will be older than either my husband and I are comfortable with when we finally do have a second child. The insurance company wielded more authority in this decision than my ob/gyn and essentially forced the decision on my family before we were ready. To the extent the pro-choice community advocates for all issues surrounding women's health, they need to fight harder, shout louder, about the cost and restriction women face surrounding health coverage. And perhaps if the anti-choice community wants to make real headway in bringing down the total number of abortions they could use the power of their constituency to tackle the causes of abortion and fight for seamless, affordable health care related to pregnancy and deliver. Far more often than not those causes are not drug addiction, one-night stands, or callous irresponsibility. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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