Earlier this month, Suzanne Mazzola, a 34-year-old woman, died in childbirth from a life-threatening condition diagnosed during her pregnancy. She left behind her husband of nine years and four children. I can’t tell you how sad it made me to read her story. Or to read this description of it by LifeNews writer Steven Ertelt:

Mazzola proved that there really is no greater love than laying down’s one life for someone else. The 34-year-old died last week after giving birth to her fourth child, a beautiful little boy named Owen.

Ertelt’s article implies that Mazzola deliberately chose to die instead of ending her pregnancy to save herself. Here’s what worries me about that: I feel that often, discussions of matters of faith fall too easily into frames of abstract right and wrong, and lose sight of the other reasons people involved may have for making decisions. We might talk about failings of faith, and forget to think about mental health. We talk about belief, and forget to think about peer pressure, or the importance of deep social ties, and how things we talk about can affect the people around us.

My own history gives me reason to find this particular way of describing Mazzola’s story very disturbing. Let’s go back 35 years.

At 5 years old, I was the last person my father had the strength to smile at before he died. He’d had one chance to live, and he wouldn’t take it because our church prohibited blood transfusions. God was going to bring him back in the resurrection any day now anyway, right?

Fast forward a few years. I needed emergency surgery, because my infected appendix went untreated long enough to cause full blown peritonitis: infection of the abdominal cavity. The procedure to treat it required a large incision and was very dangerous—but it almost didn’t matter. The doctors at the hospital I was checked into wouldn’t operate unless they could use blood if they thought they needed to. My mom and stepfather wouldn’t hear of it. But then, neither would I.

I agreed that I would just have to die if my doctors wouldn’t agree to operate without blood, because my father had given us all that example of perfect faith. Our church sermons were full of stories about people who died for our beliefs, and in our own household, my father had been just such a hero. I loved him. I wanted to be worthy of him. There wasn’t even a conversation, a question, a doubt. I was personally prepared to die before my tenth birthday if a doctor didn’t agree to operate without the possibility of a blood transfusion under any circumstance. Finally, at a different hospital, one did. And here I still am.

My dad couldn’t see a way to go on living as a person who’d violated the tenets of his faith. It was unthinkable to him. There’s a word for choosing to die. The word doesn’t matter. The fact of choosing to die matters for the people you leave behind. My father’s act was a social contagion so powerful that the child I was, scared as I was, thought nothing of imitating it. It was unthinkable to me to do anything else.

Now, the level of peer pressure that exists in fundamentalist faith communities is something I’ve seen no equivalent of in the more liberal and secular circles I’ve spent my time in since leaving my childhood faith. I don’t always relate to people who grew up in environments where they were told they’d be just as welcome no matter what they decided to do, as long as they were happy. And I think maybe they, in turn, don’t entirely relate to people whose private choices about things like whom to date or what medical procedures to have can cost them the goodwill of everyone they depend on. Love doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Some opinions kill their carriers. Some stories are powerful carriers of such fatal opinions. The things my father learned at church likely killed him, and the pain his very untimely death caused did serious damage to each member of my family. The same beliefs almost killed me as a child. As an adult, again in need of emergency surgery, the beliefs of my Catholic health-care providers—beliefs that have led to the deaths of other women before—put me in danger again as my condition deteriorated in the course of waiting for a natural miscarriage before they would treat me.

Let’s write my dad’s story another way. A stubborn young man and his equally stubborn partner convert to the strict faith of Jehovah’s Witnesses, alienating themselves from their families. The sermons and literature they find include constant references to believers giving up their lives for the faith, and socializing with unbelievers is strongly discouraged. He leaves a promising career to go minister “where the need is greater,” and takes whatever menial work he can find in a small town where they know no one outside the local Kingdom Hall. He and his growing family build close ties in their new religion, one that disfellowships, or severs all social ties with, people who break the laws of the church. He gets sick, and he has two choices: break the faith for a chance to live, or die for certain. He chooses death.

If we weren’t talking about a matter of faith, we’d wonder if someone who chose so certainly to die had undiagnosed mental health issues. Wouldn’t we really have to ask whether or not my father was secretly relieved to have an honorable way out, if we saw him as a person, as opposed to a representative of a belief? Wouldn’t we have to wonder that about someone who recklessly threw his family into poverty for a new faith, who got so angry over the misbehavior of toddlers that many of my few memories of him involve being spanked, a man who chose to die in his mid-30s based on stories someone told him?

Of course, we take on varying levels of risk every day of our lives. Some people even take quite dangerous jobs—soldiers, police officers, firefighters. And yet, anyone would be worried about someone in such a profession who simply expected to die and wouldn’t try to save themselves if they could. We distinguish between the acceptance of risk and resignation to untimely death.

So it worries me tremendously when religious people in high peer-pressure communities start glorifying what they describe as a kind of voluntary martyrdom involving a common, but potentially dangerous, situation: pregnancy. There just aren’t many chances to die a hero in the course of an ordinary life, which could sound appealing to people suffering from depression, and that’s something people should be cautious in remembering. But what else would anti-choice people say when something happens that contravenes their routine assertions that pregnancy is no big deal?

To suggest that childbirth is ever safe and simple is disrespectful to the bravery of everyone who’s carried a pregnancy. It’s a risky enterprise even with trained medical support. “Woman dies in childbirth” is such a ubiquitous fictional trope that it’s almost invisible; it works because everyone knows that pregnancy can be deadly, even though most women can and should reasonably expect to survive the experience. It’s not a polite topic of conversation, but whoever you are, your mother risked her life to bring you into the world.

Even so, fundamentalist Protestant and Catholic cultures have been saturated for years with claims that pregnancy is never really dangerous. That’s why they’re often so outraged by having to include life and health exceptions to pass their odious abortion bans. The very idea of pregnancy as a dangerous health condition offends them: It takes the focus off the potential life and brings it back to the fully realized human being carrying the pregnancy.

Then a woman like Mazzola—by all accounts a loving spouse and parent—dies from pregnancy-related complications in her mid-30s. Lest she be proof that pregnancy can be dangerous, she has to be turned into a martyr for the faith, an example to hold up to others.

When I first read the LifeNews article, the way it was presented reminded me powerfully of stories of martyrdom told in the Kingdom Halls I attended as a child. Stories about Jehovah’s Witnesses going willingly to the gas chambers of the Third Reich for maintaining their faith, refusing to save their own lives through lies to repressive regimes who targeted members of the church, things like that. I know firsthand that glorifying stories of fatal self-sacrifice can kill people and devastate families in conservative and insular religious communities. Communities who might even share the anti-choice belief that abortion should be “unthinkable.”

I also know that undiagnosed or ignored depression is a dangerous thing. Postpartum depression, in the midst of a community that may fetishize motherhood and wifely obedience, is a hard thing even to admit to. Many devout people suffer in silence. Given that the explanation for things like the distressing, intrusive thoughts that more than 80 percent of new parents may experience is likelier to be demons than biology in some faith communities, if they do talk about their distress, the prescription is likely to be prayer, faith, and positive thinking. What might this story, when presented as LifeNews frames it, sound like to a depressed and overwhelmed mother facing a potentially dangerous pregnancy of her own?

Because whatever Suzanne Mazzola thought in life, now her situation is being used to glorify what’s being portrayed by anti-choice activists as a choice to die by refusal to consider abortion as a treatment option.

Though I did some checking, and regardless of what her position on abortion might have been, that’s probably not what Mazzola thought was going on. From what’s been reported, she was scared of what might happen, and I think most people would have been were they in her shoes, but as a friend of hers told the SunSentinel, no one expected this outcome.

There are some pregnancy complications for which doctors will automatically, if they’re not practicing in a Catholic hospital, recommend abortion because it may reduce or eliminate the risk to the mother’s life. According to medical professional groups, placental accreta, Mazzola’s condition, in which the placenta has burrowed into the uterine lining, is not necessarily one of them. Both abortion and delivery pose the risk of serious complications, and Mazzola reportedly had a serious form of the condition. The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends the following as a general management guideline: Wait until near the usual point of fetal lung maturity, usually around 34 weeks but customized to the patient, and perform a scheduled, preterm cesarean section delivery with either a resection of the uterus or a hysterectomy, and to be prepared for the onset of serious bleeding. ACOG says that maternal mortality can be as high as 7 percent for placenta accreta patients, which is many times the usual rate, but it’s still a 93 percent chance of survival.

Mazzola went in at 35 weeks for a scheduled c-section, which is very close to the treatment recommendation that someone would get from recent ACOG guidelines. Tragically, her blood loss was too severe, though the availability of 15 doctors in the operating room for her treatment suggests that the hospital staff were prepared to do everything they could, doubtless in consultation with the family. That doesn’t sound to me like giving up. It sounds like a case where someone who wanted very much to live couldn’t be saved from a dangerous health condition. That happens sometimes, even with the best medical treatment.

In other words, given a frightening diagnosis during a wanted pregnancy, Mazzola appears to have hoped for the best and done exactly what most doctors would have advised for the best chance of survival. To rewrite this as if it were some kind of deliberate choice to go to her death—which the framing of Ertelt’s article implies—appears to be a substantial misreading of usual medical practice in treating placental accreta in the absence of other emergency complications.

So I hope Mazzola’s family hasn’t gotten around to reading that article, because whether it sounds like a touching tribute or not, I can tell you, it’s hard to grow up believing that your parent decided to die. It does things to people.

And it’s dangerous to suggest to bystanders that, given a choice, the best decision in any circumstance is to willingly and unnecessarily choose death. You never know if the person reading is suffering from depression and might be looking for a way out. It’s frightening to contemplate the damage such words can do.

What really matters to me in writing this is that there might be someone out there facing a dangerous medical condition, for which the treatment is something that your faith community disapproves of. As the child of someone who made a choice like this and knows how very hard it is, I want to tell you something:

You are important to your family and friends. Your loved ones will miss you every day for the rest of their lives if anything happens to you, and they need you. Even the ones you butt heads with all the time, or the ones you think have it all together. They need you. Not the memory of you, or the example of you, but really, actually, you. You, in reality, are better for the people who care about you than any sainted story and photograph.

You matter for your own sake. Even if you are a woman, and you can potentially do this amazing thing where you create an entire other person, you’re already enough. I hope you’ll at least consider taking that under advisement. Women’s lives are valuable.

You matter even if you don’t understand why you keep thinking horrible things that make you ashamed, or hate yourself so often that it feels like a second job. These are hard things to live through, I know, but you don’t have to bear it alone. If you’re in such a bad place that it seems reasonable to you that it might be God’s will for you to go, that’s probably not God talking. No matter what you believe, this is the one and only human life you can guarantee you’re going to get. Even if you and I agree about nothing else at all, I’d consider the world diminished by your death.

You deserve to live. I hope you will consider fighting to continue doing that. I hope you will try to stay with us.