Tragedies mount for women with ill-fated pregnancies under Texas’ abortion bans

Bridget Grumet, Austin American-Statesman
May 24, 2023

Life took a wrenching twist for Jessica Bernardo last fall. She went from being an elated, expectant mother — listening to audiobooks about pregnancy, teasing her husband about installing child safety gates on the stairs of their Frisco home — to using a private browser on her computer to search for an abortion.

Bernardo desperately wanted the child she named Emma. About 15 weeks into the pregnancy, though, doctors said the child had severe medical conditions and would not survive to birth.

Continued: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/columns/2023/05/24/grumet-texas-abortion-bans-inflict-growing-toll-expectant-mothers/70248396007/

Texas Forced This Woman to Give Birth to a Stillborn Son. She’s Suing

Tessa Stuart
Mon, May 22, 2023

After multiple miscarriages, Kiersten Hogan thought she would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. She’d nearly given up hope when in June 2021 she learned she was pregnant. But at just 19 weeks — days after Texas’ Senate Bill 8 went into effect — Hogan woke up at 5 a.m. in excruciating pain. She called 911 and was instructed to unlock her front door and lay on the ground until EMTs arrived. “It was the longest 5 minutes of my life,” Hogan recalled on Monday.

Her water had broken. By the time she arrived at the hospital, she had lost too much amniotic fluid for her son to survive — but hospital staff didn’t tell her that. “They didn’t tell me much about my son’s chances of survival. But the one thing they did make clear repeatedly was that I should not leave,” a tearful Hogan said Monday. “I was told that if I tried to discharge myself, or seek care elsewhere, that I could be arrested for trying to kill my child. So of course, I stayed.”

Continued https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/texas-forced-woman-birth-stillborn-182841209.html

8 women join suit against Texas over abortion bans, claim their lives were put in danger

The original lawsuit was filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights in March.

By Nadine El-Bawab
May 22, 2023

The Center for Reproductive Rights is expected to add eight more women to a lawsuit it filed against Texas over its abortion ban, claiming their lives were put at risk due to the law. This brings the total number of plaintiffs to 15.

The suit alleged that Texas' abortion bans have denied the plaintiffs and countless other pregnant people necessary and potentially life-saving medical care because physicians in the state fear liability, according to a draft of the complaint shared with ABC News.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/US/8-women-join-suit-texas-abortion-bans-claim/story?id=99480988

Woman said she went into sepsis before she could get lifesaving abortion care in Texas

Texas law prohibits all abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected.

By Nadine El-Bawab
May 15, 2023

A Texas woman said she had to wait until she developed sepsis before physicians could provide her with lifesaving abortion care.

Texas has several abortion bans in place that prohibit nearly all abortions, except when a mother's life is at risk or there is a risk of serious bodily harm. The state has civil and criminal penalties for performing banned abortions.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-sepsis-life-saving-abortion-care-texas/story?id=99294313

15.05.2023

Miles Apart: Texas and California Lawmakers Stake Opposite Corners of Abortion Policy

It’s about 1,500 miles from Austin to Sacramento, but Texas and California lawmakers are a million miles apart on how to treat private data related to reproductive health.

5/5/2023
by JENNIFER PINSOF and HAYLEY TSUKAYAMA

State lawmakers in Texas and California are staking out opposite corners of digital public policy in the post-Roe era: in Texas by trying to ban online speech about abortion, and in California by trying to protect those seeking abortions from dragnet-style digital surveillance.

How these states legislate reproductive data privacy and information access could affect millions of vulnerable people nationwide, because the internet doesn’t stop at state borders.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/05/05/texas-california-abortion-privacy/

06.05.2023

Commentary

Assembly Bill 793

digital surveillance and abortion

digital technology and abortion

SUPREME COURT’S ABORTION RULING DISPROPORTIONATELY AFFECTS BLACK PEOPLE WITH LOW INCOMES IN THE DEEP SOUTH

May 05, 2023
Rhonda Sonnenberg

Even before Alauni took an at-home pregnancy test just four weeks after a single instance of unplanned sexual activity, she knew it would be positive.

The 24-year-old Texas college student – a single, working mother of three children under the age of 6, one of whom is autistic – immediately felt the familiar signs of her pregnancies. She had intended to buy the Plan B “morning after” pill, but was in the process of moving to another city and hadn’t yet secured new housing.

Continued: https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/05/05/supreme-courts-abortion-ruling-affects-black-people-low-incomes

Women accused of facilitating abortion in Galveston wrongful-death lawsuit file countersuit

The women are accused of helping their friend terminate her pregnancy, but they now claim her ex-husband, who brought the lawsuit, knew she had obtained the medication and did nothing to stop her.

BY ELEANOR KLIBANOFF
MAY 2, 2023

A man who is suing his ex-wife’s friends for allegedly helping her get an abortion may have known about her plans and done nothing to stop her, according to a new legal filing.

Marcus Silva brought a wrongful-death lawsuit in March in Galveston County, claiming three women helped his now-ex-wife obtain abortion-inducing medication and “conceal the pregnancy and murder from Marcus, the father of the unborn child.”

Continued: https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/02/texas-abortion-wrongful-death-lawsuit/

02.05.2023

Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act

They helped their friend get an abortion. Now a bitter ex-husband is suing them

Marcus Silva’s lawsuit is a metaphor for the creepy, stupid and cruel nature of the anti-choice movement

Moira Donegan
Sat 15 Apr 2023

It wasn’t initially clear how Marcus Silva, a Texas man, even knew about his ex-wife’s abortion. Last month, just weeks after the divorce his wife had filed for was finalized, Silva filed a “wrongful death” lawsuit against three of her closest friends, seeking $1m from each. He claims that the women helped his wife obtain abortion medication in July 2022 – two months after she had filed for divorce from him, and just a few weeks after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v Wade and states like Texas outlawed abortion. And Silva had text messages to prove it.

continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/15/texas-abortion-bounty-hunter-law-friends-sued

USA – What plaintiffs targeting abortion pill want might not even be possible

BY: SOFIA RESNICK
MARCH 25, 2023

At the center of the federal anti-abortion lawsuit against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the abortion drug mifepristone and the regimen that reportedly accounts for the majority of abortions in post-Roe America. That’s why the whole country is bracing itself for a ruling from a notoriously anti-abortion judge in Amarillo, Texas.

The attention and confusion around this case might end up being the most impactful aspects about it, as many legal scholars doubt the judge has the legal authority to do what plaintiffs are asking for, which boils down to forcing the FDA to essentially recall a drug that for two decades has maintained a record of efficacy and safety. But regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome, legal experts still think a ruling that even briefly or partially favors plaintiffs will likely have lasting consequences on U.S. abortion access and affect medication policy beyond abortion.

Continued: https://lailluminator.com/2023/03/25/what-plaintiffs-targeting-abortion-pill-want-might-not-even-be-possible/

Abortion Laws Stand Between Pregnant Texans and the Care They Need

Doctors are left to guess at whether helping their patients will land them in prison.

BY SARA HUTCHINSON
MARCH 24, 2023

Doctors have a code, a set of principles meant to guide their practice: Give care. Act justly. Respect patients. Do no harm. But for Texas doctors, especially obstetrician-gynecologists, following those seemingly straightforward principles has become a legal and ethical minefield.

Physicians are finding themselves torn between providing medically appropriate care and staying in compliance with the state’s draconian anti-abortion laws. The stakes couldn’t be higher: risking major fines and up to life in prison for doctors on one side, and on the other, often putting women’s lives at risk because of delays in care or refusals to provide formerly routine procedures. As a result, medical decisions regarding pregnancy complications now involve a host of new stakeholders—hospital administrators and lawyers—who may put questions of institutional risk above patient well-being.

Continued: https://prospect.org/health/2023-03-24-abortion-laws-pregnant-texans/