Wisconsin OB-GYN’s heartbreaking abortion story—and how IVF helped complete her family

The possible return to a near total abortion ban in Wisconsin—which depends on the outcome of the April 1 state Supreme Court election—would gravely interfere with Dr. Anna Igler’s work as an OB-GYN near Green Bay.  

“Terrible things happen in pregnancy,” says Anna Igler, an OB-GYN near Green Bay. “All babies aren’t healthy and all pregnancies are not healthy for the baby or the mother. That’s just biology.” 

She knows that first-hand.

After giving birth to a healthy son, Igler says she was thrilled to get pregnant again.

“I had my first positive pregnancy test result on Mother’s Day of 2020, and I was just so excited because I loved my son so much…and I wanted to have another baby so much.”

But when Igler was lying on the table for her 24-week growth scan, she saw that her baby’s head was measuring at less than the first percentile.

“I started to cry and my husband, who was with me, was extremely confused, but I knew that (her head) was extremely small and that’s extremely bad,” Igler says. “I knew that something was really wrong.” 

She just wasn’t sure how dismal her daughter’s prognosis would be until the results of an amniotic fluid test came in.

“I was at work when my doctor called me with the test results, and I collapsed. My husband had to come and pick me up. I couldn’t drive,” she says.

The results revealed that Igler had contracted a common virus called cytomegalovirus (CMV), and that it had crossed her placenta and infected her developing baby’s brain. 

Her daughter’s prognosis was dismal—she would suffer.

If her baby survived until birth, which was unlikely, she would have been born deaf, likely blind, severely cognitively impaired, and would have had seizures and major organ damage. 

“There was no medicine, no surgery, no treatment, no therapy, no hope,” Igler says. “My daughter would have had a life full of suffering.”

Reluctantly, Igler and her husband decided that she would get an abortion.

“Maybe that’s not the decision that you would make if you’re somebody reading this,” she says. “But that is your decision. This was my decision and my husband’s decision…for our family and child.”

While Igler faced this tragedy in 2020, before Roe v. Wade had been overturned by the US Supreme Court, the couple were still forced to leave their home state of Wisconsin for the procedure.

That’s because Wisconsin bans abortions after 20 weeks, except to save the life of the mother or to preserve one of her major bodily functions from irreversible damage. Doctors face six years in jail for breaking the law.

READ MORE: OB-GYN fears Wisconsin women will die if Brad Schimel is elected to Supreme Court

Igler says that the staff at the Colorado clinic the couple traveled to were “incredibly caring…I probably cried most of the time I was there. One of the staff members brought me roses from her garden. I will always remember how kind that was.”

After the abortion, Igler says she went home and “grieved deeply for a really long time. The fact that I had to be there for my son is what kept me going. He had to have his mom there for him.”

Dr. Igler admits that going back to work after she lost her daughter and delivering other people’s healthy babies “was a nightmare, pure torture. I would be at the hospital and would literally think, ‘How am I going to get through the next hour?’”

When Igler and her husband began trying to have another baby, they were unable to get pregnant naturally—so they turned to in vitro fertilization, and became pregnant with another daughter who is now 2 years old.

Igler says despite her medical training, she lived in fear throughout the entire pregnancy—especially leading up to her 24-week growth scan of her baby.

“I thought about wearing a blindfold for the appointment,” she admits.

When her daughter was born, Igler and her husband cried with relief. 

“I felt this great sense of relief and love that she was there and she was healthy,” Igler says. “It was one of the best moments of my life.”

Igler has since given birth to a third child using IVF.

As she considers the debates over reproductive rights since Roe v. Wade was overturned, she says there’s one myth in particular she wants to bust, once and for all: President Donald Trump’s insistence that health care providers are aborting healthy full-term pregnancies and killing newborn babies. 

“He said that physicians like us kill babies up to birth and after birth,” she says. “It’s so false. It makes me so angry and it’s so flagrantly insulting. I’m up at all hours of the night saving babies and saving women from bleeding to death.”

Debunking Trump’s outrageous falsehood and sharing her story “gives my daughter’s life more meaning for me,” she says.