I was pregnant with Quintuplets. Selective reduction broke me.

At the age of 28 I was admitted to the Antepartum unit in the Mount Sinai Hospital, where I lay day and night in Trendenburg position, flat on my back, my head 15 degrees under my feet. It was hoped that my twin girls with the advantage of gravity could stay in me so that they could make it up to 27 weeks. I still had seven weeks to go.

In this uncomfortable position I spent endless hours on my iPhone to investigate early births. Yes, girls who were born did better than boys prematurely. Yes, 26 to 27 weeks were much more viable than babies born after 24 to 25 weeks. Even after 24 weeks they would stay on the newborn ICU for a few months, a frightening and stressful time filled with ups and downs, but I could still arise with two healthy girls who may have some developmental arrears, muscular weaknesses and////// Or some learning disorders, but certainly their lives would be worth life.

Yet I prayed, although I had never been religious. I prayed that my babies would make it and that I would stay calm because I knew that fear would give me a birth. And fear was my basic line as long as I could remember. Now I had to concentrate on my babies, regardless of the stress. Fear had no place here.

I had fought against stress and fear at every step of this pregnancy, and I have tried to become pregnant for years. Eventually my husband and I went to an infertility specialist and started the painful (and precious!) Journey of IVF. After daily injections of hormones and eventually intra -uterine insemination, in which my husband’s sperm was injected directly into my womb, we were joyfully amazed to discover that I would become pregnant in the first round.

We were even more stunned by what came next.

“Uh, I think you should sit down,” said my doctor, turning to my husband, I was undergoing an ultrasound.

Ben sat down while the doctor pointed to the screen.

“One, two, three, four, five … There are five heart beats and five bags.” He paused to have that information sink in. Then he said: “Dress you and my nurse will help you to my office. We will discuss our options. “

He spoke sober, but the kwak in his voice and the look on his face made it clear that he was also in shock.

Five heartbeat, although I knew, because I was trained as a doctor, that ‘heart rate’ is just a warm and fuzzy term that use medical professionals to describe the sounds of fluttering cells of embryos to be undeveloped to still have hearts.

The chance of a Kwintuplet pregnancy is 1 on more than 50 million. Even with IUI, the chance of quintuplets are still extremely rare, because five adult follicles (in theory) would have been seen prior to insemination. But there are several pregnancies, and when they happen, of course or via IUI or other infertility treatments, the health and lives of all babies and the mother they wear, an increased risk run.

In my case, on 5’3 ”and with a weight of less than 100 pounds, five babies could have killed me. They would certainly jeopardize the life of their bombing, because the average pregnancy period for Quints is only 29 weeks – that is the average, which means that many are born rather than being born. I couldn’t wear five babies.

After the shock had passed – as far as the shock would ever pass – we met our doctor who told us that our only option was a selective reduction. Selective reduction is another way to say that some of my babies should be broken down. Although I support the right of a woman to choose both medical and personal reasons, I never thought I should choose to have an abortion. I wanted to have a family – I had endured enormous pain and discomfort to get pregnant – but now I should “choose” to break down some of my own babies!

I asked if triplets could be an option, but to my size, triplets were still too great a risk for health and my life and life of my babies. I could only wear twins.

Selective reduction does not mean that selecting which embryos will live and which will die based on their gender but on their chances of viability. To assess that viability, a CFS – chorionic villus sampling – of the placental bags was necessary. That procedure – itself a risk for the fetus because five long needles would pierce my belly and every placenta bag and hopefully not piercing the moving fetus – could only be performed for 13 weeks. (In cases of unique pregnancies, 10 weeks is often sufficient, but with five pressure in the same womb, those extra three weeks were crucial.) I was only nine weeks, so I had a month to go. Another month for my babies to grow in me and for me to fall in love with them all the more, while I know that three of them would be ‘reduced’.

Words do not describe how sick, anematic and pathetic I was in those months that I stayed pregnant with the five developing babies until we could get a CFS and then plan the reduction. I was stunned from the superior -visits, agreements and fascination of the medical staff that treated me. I had become a medical deviation that was created by the science that had to undergo a winding ‘decision’ to sacrifice three of my babies, so that two of them, and I, their mother, could live.

The choice of which of those three would be demolished was not to make me. It was a medical decision that my OB/Gyn would make, a decision that she could only make after waiting for another 10 days for the test results. By that moment the quints had developed for almost 15 weeks – almost four months of mother binding. Or mourning mothers. But as every mother knows, you will do what you can do to save your babies, and I knew, as a doctor and a mother, that “selective reduction” was not about killing three babies, but about saving two.

Five weeks after the selective reduction, even twins turned out to be a risk for their own survival, so I was admitted to Mount Sinai, where I almost hung upside down, praying that my babies would reach at least 24 weeks. After 23 weeks my work started. Then massacaos, pushing, pain, joy and sorrow. And finally, pathetic, small little cries. I was a mother.

My babies, peacefully and beautiful, were born on October 1, 2012, around 10.30 pm and died early the next morning. I didn’t cry those hours while I held my babies, knowing that they would pass. There were no measures that could save my two small 1 pound, underdeveloped babies. They felt no pain. They were warm and cozy in their hand -knitted sweaters donated by volunteers who expand such clothing for extreme premature babies. They were kissed. They were loved. They were held. I cherished every moment that I was a mother for them.

And while I held them, my own body failed. I had developed a serious postpartum bleeding that required immediate operation. While the doctors encouraged me to let my babies go to save my life, I refused. I would not leave them while they were in life. I owed them my love and motherhood for their short time here.

“This has passed,” said a doctor, after checking their heartbeats. No longer fluttering cells, their hearts had developed, but one of those little hearts no longer struck.

Yet I wouldn’t let them take her. Not yet. Her sister was alive and warm. We would stay together.

When the doctor returned to the room, she looked at me with soft, compassionate eyes. “She has passed.”

The doctor left the room, crying. Her humanity comforted me.

All five of my babies had failed.

I started to fade without even a moment in an operation to cry or to process the loss of my babies. I was sick – so sick. I saw lights above me – not the lights of the hospital, but golden, iridescent lights that pulled me to them. I died. In the distance I heard voices.

“Epinephrine, Stat !!!! Her pressure is refueling. She has lost a lot of blood. “

My heart felt like it had exploded when the IV -epinephrine flew into my system, but then I calmed.

Lying in the same bed that I had the last three weeks and listened to the heartbeats of healthy babies in the Antepartum unit, I was no longer almost upside down, no longer pregnant, no longer a mother. I had lost the battle for my children, but I lived. And I wouldn’t live if I had tried to wear those five. If I died, I wouldn’t have the three beautiful children I have today. The breaking of those fetuses saved my life and my life led to more life.

“Selective reduction” is a decision that should not make a woman, and it is a decision that does not want to make a woman. But it is a decision that a mother might have to make. And for that reason, along with so many other reasons, only a mother and her doctor must be enabled to make that difficult choice. The choice to live or die.

Amy Sosne, MD, M.ed. Is the author of the upcoming memoirs “A world upside down: a memoir of healing.” Amy graduated from Mount Sinai Medical School and was a psychiatric resident when she suffered a breakdown that led to her own journey with treatment of mental health care with regard to sexual abuse that she suffered as a child. She is now the mother of three thriving children and works in higher education and elementary outreach while teaching yoga and mindfulness, and pioneering interactive educational programs with students and local primary schools.

Do you have a compelling personal story that you would like to see published on Huffpost? Discover what we are looking for here and send us a pitch at pitch@huffpost.com.