Sarah Osmundsenson is an obstetrician in Tennessee.

Specifically, she's a maternal fetal medicine specialist, which means that if a pregnant patient

is referred to her, the blissful stress-free pregnancy of their dreams is probably off the table.

A typical case of hers might be a woman comes in with pre-aclamia, a serious complication

that often manifests as high blood pressure.

With pre-aclamia, we generally counsel women that this is a pregnancy

associated condition. It starts from the placenta, and when the placenta is no longer

inside of you, also known as delivery, the pre-aclamseo will go away.

And so the cure for mom is to deliver.

It's always to deliver.

But we have a second patient that we are concerned about and that

second patient is the baby or the fetus and so we are trying to walk this line of

delivering early enough to prevent complications for mom, but also late enough that the baby doesn't have serious long-term complications related to prematurity.

The pregnant women she sees might have diabetes, organ transplants, heart disease,

or the fetus might have such severe complications that it's very unlikely to survive.

And with each case, she has to think about both patients.

Osmonson does not perform abortions, but sometimes she has to bring up the option with her patients.

In over 10 plus years, she's developed a way of bringing it up, giving her own medical advice, but also hearing out the patients on what they value.

You know, I had really come to kind of a place of peace with that that, you know, we were

honoring patients decisions, even if they're not the

decision that I personally would make or that I would recommend.

And then the whole balancing act got upended.

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