Indiana Mom Seeks Policy Change on Abortion Records

A Hamilton County mom is emotionally calling on state leaders to rethink recent moves to make abortion records public after her unborn baby was given a fatal diagnosis.

In September, Amber Martin shakily moved her hand to reveal two red lines on a positive pregnancy test. She and her partner, Michael Dowd, had experienced a miscarriage earlier that year.

“I fell apart, because this is not a decision that any of us wanted to make, it’s not something that anybody wants to have happen to them,” Martin told I-Team 8. “It’s crazy, because the day that we found out we were pregnant, we were actually scheduled to go to a fertility clinic that day. So, I called and I was like, ‘I have a positive pregnancy test.’”

But hope soon turned to hardship. Martin received a crushing diagnosis at 20 weeks: Arlo had no brain activity and would not survive in utero, birth, or in life.

Martin was given few choices. Doctors told her she could wait to deliver the baby naturally, knowing he would suffocate during labor or almost immediately after. She could also choose to have an early induced delivery, which is the technical definition of abortion according to the World Health Organization. If she waited too long to decide, Indiana law would require her to go out of state for help.

“I knew that I wasn’t going to be coming home with this little boy,” Martin said.

Martin was immediately inundated with over a dozen pages of paperwork asking for extensive information, including her address, medical history, occupation, race, and religion. All collected information would be included in a Terminated Pregnancy Report or a TPR.

“The gist of it is that you’re being questioned,” Martin said. “Then you’re being warned that if you’re picking this and you’re picking these procedures that at some point in time, they can come back to you, and you can be charged with a felony or potentially murdering your child.”

Martin’s operation was deemed medically necessary. The doctors told her Arlo would not feel anything from the procedure. She says having it gave her the chance to honor her son’s short life.

“These pregnancy reports were always for public health research and data,” Liane Hulka, Co-Founder and Board Chair at Our Choice Coalition said. “They were never meant to be what our Attorney General, Todd Rokita, says … to be turned over to the public citizen to police abortion providers.”

Martin believes the information on the TPR would be enough to find her. Despite the risk, she’s not afraid to say that having an abortion saved her life and meant Arlo would not suffer.

“I remember just coming back from the procedure and wanting to be able to hold him, and not being able to,” Martin said.

Martin plans to begin advocating for better education on abortion and what might lead a woman to that choice.