Flu infection early in pregnancy led to miscarriage for Bagdasarian

They were married in 2003 and by the fall of 2007, they were happily expecting their first child.

“I was part of a (medical research) study at UM where we were getting regular ultrasounds done, so I had more ultrasounds than most people have during their pregnancy, and all my ultrasounds had been fine,” she said.

Months passed after that early-in-pregnancy illness with the flu and everything seemed to be going well. When her pregnancy entered its 18th week, at the beginning of 2008, Bagdasarian said she was scheduled for a routine ultrasound.

“We were so excited,” she said. “My husband was working, so I went with my mom and my mother-in-law. At that ultrasound, they said things looked bad. There was a heartbeat, but the fetus was very underdeveloped and there was very little amniotic fluid. They did not think that this was going to be a pregnancy compatible with life.”

She left that appointment completely heartbroken.

“I went home and cried for a week,” she said. “After a week of crying and talking to family and friends and talking daily with my husband, we went back and had another ultrasound. And things were not looking better. In fact, they were looking worse.”

Ultimately, they chose to terminate the pregnancy.

“We decided that I was going to go in for a procedure because I didn’t want to continue this just devastating, drawn-out process of carrying a pregnancy that was not going to survive,” she said. “But the day that we went in for my surgery, there was no heartbeat. So it was not a termination. It was a pregnancy loss with a subsequent surgical procedure.

“People seem to think that abortion and fetal loss and miscarriage are all very different, and often times they’re not. This was literally the difference between one day and the next. One day, there was a heartbeat in a pregnancy that was not compatible with life, and the next day there was no heartbeat, and our options were the same.”

But at least she had an option, she said. For too many American women today living in states where access to abortion is extremely restricted, there is no choice.

“It was 2008 and it was before the overturning of Roe v. Wade. There are women who are in my situation living in other states who now don’t have that option,” Bagdasarian said.

With the loss of that “very wanted” pregnancy, she said it felt as if she had lost the family she dreamed would be hers.

“You’re losing your future, everything you pictured. I think about it all the time,” she said. “We would have a 16-year-old right now.”

Six more missed miscarriages

Bagdasarian desperately wanted to understand what had gone wrong with her first pregnancy.

“A lot of times when pregnancy losses occur, there is not an in-depth study,” Bagdasarian said. “I was a medical resident, and I worked at the University of Michigan hospital, and I called every single person I could. I called the pathologist, and I said, ‘Could you do more studies on this?’

“Not only did the pathologist do additional studies that normally wouldn’t have happened … we subsequently found out that there was influenza in the lungs and all through the placenta.”

They determined that her flu infection early in the first trimester was passed along to the fetus, causing an inflammatory response that resulted in growth restriction and ultimately second-trimester loss.

Her case was documented in the Emerging Infectious Diseases Journal in 2011, and added to the scientific literature about pregnancy outcomes following first-trimester influenza infections.

“My goal, even before I took this job, was always, how can I take things I’ve been through, the pain and experiences, and turn it into something that is helpful to other people?” she said.

“This is why I’m so passionate about vaccines.” When she hears pregnant women say they don’t want to get the flu vaccine, it “is like a knife through my heart.”

After that traumatic loss, she and her husband tried again. And again. And again.

“I had six more unexplained pregnancy losses,” she said. “And every time, I would ask for genetic tests, and the genetics were fine. All I could guess is that that first influenza infection… somehow impacted my immune system. That is just a hypothesis.”

The six subsequent miscarriages all took place at about 12 weeks into her pregnancies.

“I’d go in and get an ultrasound, and there was a heartbeat. Then I would go get another ultrasound and there was no heartbeat,” she said.

They all were what’s known as a missed miscarriage or silent miscarriage, which occurs when the fetus has died or stopped developing, but there are no outward signs or symptoms that the pregnancy has ended.

“Every pregnancy loss I had, I needed some sort of intervention,” she said, with either prescription drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, the same drugs used in medication abortion, or a dilation and curettage procedure, which is the same procedure that can be used to abort a pregnancy in the first trimester.

“If I had lived in a state or at a time where those were not an option to me, I could have risked sepsis and death.”

Bagdasarian recalled each time they picked up the drugs at the pharmacy to help her complete her miscarriages. She wondered what the pharmacist was thinking about her.

“There is still a lot of stigma,” she said. “I think this really needs to be judgment-free. These are health care decisions that people are making for a variety of complex reasons.”

‘Childless cat ladies’ comment hits hard

What has been especially unsettling, Bagdasarian said, is the way in which access to health care has eroded in recent years — especially in the aftermath of the 2022 Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — along with the shift in political rhetoric around childbearing.

Fourteen states now have total abortion bans with very limited exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research and policy organization, and eight states ban abortions when the fetus may have a genetic anomaly, even when it’s determined to be incompatible with life and the fetus is expected to die before or soon after birth.

Although it’s difficult to track maternal deaths associated with abortion restrictions, ProPublica reported earlier this month that two women died in Georgia because their medical care was delayed by laws limiting access to abortion and threats of prosecution for doctors who provide them.

In several states, legislators have also introduced legislation to restrict or ban the use of mifepristone and misoprostol, the two prescription drugs that are used in medication abortion.

Bagdasarian said comments Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance has made in defending his stance in a 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson about “childless cat ladies” also is hurtful.

During that interview, Vance, who is former President Donald Trump’s running mate, said women without children are “miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. .. The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

JD Vance calls Kamala Harris, AOC ‘childless cat ladies’

JD Vance said “the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children” in a 2021 “Tucker Carlson Tonight” interview on Fox News.

Maven – Meidas Touch

That feeling, Bagdasarian said, is especially painful for people who have struggled with infertility.

“There’s been a lot of discourse about childless cat women in our news cycle lately,” she said. “Not everyone is childless by choice, and we have to have empathy for those who have been through something traumatic and have not had the successful outcome that they wanted.

“And if you take a look at the Project 2025 playbook, it seeks to take away more reproductive freedom, and again, my whole story illustrates how all of these things are connected. You can’t protect fertility care if you’re not protecting miscarriage care, ectopic pregnancy care and abortion.”

Project 2025 was created by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and other groups to establish a national conservative policy agenda. Trump has said he disagrees with parts of the plan, though several people involved in Project 2025 previously worked in Trump’s administration, USA TODAY found in a fact check.

‘We saw some very dark times’

Her six years of pregnancy failures, Bagdasarian said, were loaded with heartbreak.

“I have a wonderful husband. We saw some very dark times together,” she said. “In 2013, I said, ‘Enough is enough. I’m done’ ” with trying to carry a pregnancy to term.

The Bagdasarians considered surrogacy instead.

At that time, surrogacy was illegal in Michigan, so they found an out-of-state surrogate. And in 2014, they had a son. Though he was born five weeks prematurely, he is now healthy and strong.

“My surrogacy baby is now a gigantic 10-year-old who is almost bigger than me.”

She said it was important to tell her story because of this crucial time in the nation when access to reproductive medicine is especially vulnerable.

“This fundamentally goes down to the question of, in 2024 and beyond, who gets to determine who can start a family, how they start a family, when they start a family, if they decide to start a family?” she said. “I think it should be us. We should get to make those decisions about our bodies.

“This is health care, and so long as we continue to other it and make it seem like it’s not health care, women will continue to die.”

Contact Kristen Shamus: [email protected]. Subscribe to the Free Press.