Erica Bailey gave birth to a stillborn in Missouri, where abortion is now essentially banned. “My precious son who lived for 39-weeks, was not seen as a person in the eyes of the law. We did not receive a birth certificate, even though I still gave birth to his 7-pound 6-ounce body,” Bailey wrote in Motherwell. “We were not able to claim him as a tax dependent, even though we paid for all the same things in preparation for his arrival, in addition to the funeral, burial, headstone, and years of trauma therapy at $150/hour. In the eyes of my very ‘pro-life’ state, he didn’t even exist.”15
