USA – The Unlikely Women Fighting for Abortion Rights

The end of Roe has turned women who terminated pregnancies for medical reasons into a political force.

By Kate Zernike
May 27, 2024

For a long time, many women who had abortions because of catastrophic fetal diagnoses told their stories only privately. Grieving pregnancies they dearly wanted and fearing the stigma of abortion, they sought the closely guarded comfort of online communities identified by the way many doctors had described the procedure — TFMR, or “termination for medical reasons.”

In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, their pain has been compounded into anger by new abortion bans across the country. While these women account for a fraction of abortions in the United States, they have emerged as the most powerful voices in the nation’s post-Roe debate, speaking out against bans with their stories of being forced across state lines and left to feel like criminals in seeking care.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/us/abortion-women-tfmr.html

Texas Supreme Court heavily scrutinizes both sides in case challenging abortion bans

Bayliss Wagner, Austin American-Statesman
Nov 29, 2023

Texas' highest court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case that will decide whether medical exceptions to Texas abortion bans are written clearly enough to protect women who face serious health risks during pregnancy.

The 22 plaintiffs in the case include several women forced to wait until they were sick with sepsis, a life-threatening condition, to terminate pregnancies that premature ruptures of membrane had already rendered nonviable; two women who traversed hundreds of miles for abortions of a nonviable twin to protect their and their healthy babies' lives; and a woman forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term, then watch her baby's skin turn purple and her eyeballs bleed as she slowly suffocated to death.

Continued: https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2023/11/29/texas-supreme-court-hears-case-challenging-texas-abortion-bans-health-risks-pregnancy-women/71727577007/

Our Abortion Stories: Two Years of Texas’ S.B. 8

On this grim two-year anniversary, we lift up the stories of Texas women and their families who are fighting for the right to abortion care.
9/1/2023
by VAL DIEZ CANSECO and ROXY SZAL

Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding precedents of Roe v. Wade, representing the largest blow to women’s constitutional rights in history. In Texas, this has been part of women’s reality for years.

Two years ago, Texas’ S.B. 8 became law: the six-week ban with a “bounty hunter” provision. At the time S.B. 8 took effect, it was considered the most restrictive abortion ban to ever take effect in the U.S. post-Roe.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/09/01/texas-abortion-stories-women-risk/

Texas Fights for the Right to Deny Women Life-Saving Abortion Care

A judge ruled Friday doctors may use “good faith judgment” in emergency situations. Texas’ AG challenged the ruling instantly

BY TESSA STUART
AUGUST 8, 2023

It was Friday afternoon, and Molly Duane had just left for a vacation when she got the news. Women with life-threatening pregnancy complications would be able to get abortions in Texas, a judge had ruled. Doctors who provided that care would be shielded from prosecution by the state. And Texas’ Senate Bill 8 — the abortion bounty law, which allows private citizens to sue anyone they suspect of aiding or abetting an abortion — had been declared unconstitutional.

Duane is a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. She had spent the past year working on a case that challenged Texas’ abortion ban as too vague when it came to medically necessary exceptions.

Continued: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/texas-abortion-bounty-law-ruling-1234802301/

08.08.2023

News

Amanda Zurawski

Ashley Brandt

Center for Reproductive Rights

TESTIFYING AGAINST TEXAS, WOMEN DENIED ABORTIONS RELIVE THE PREGNANCIES THAT ALMOST KILLED THEM

One plaintiff vomited while recounting her ordeal. The case marks the first time patients denied abortions have sued a state since Roe was overturned.

Mary Tuma
July 21 2023

WHEN SAMANTHA CASIANO learned she was pregnant last year, she and her husband felt excitement. The 29-year-old mother of four and lifelong Texas resident began collecting baby toys and a bassinet for her fifth child. During a routine ultrasound at 20 weeks, she was chatting up the technician when the room suddenly grew silent. Casiano’s doctor delivered grim news: Her baby had anencephaly, a lethal condition in which the skull and brain fail to develop.

“My first thought was, maybe surgery can fix this, but I was told, ‘Sorry, your daughter is incompatible with life, she will be born without a skull,’” Casiano said in a Texas district court hearing on Wednesday. “She was going to die inside or outside of my womb.”

Continued: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/21/texas-abortion-zurawski-lawsuit/

Doctors testify about confusion surrounding Texas’ abortion bans

Doctors testified as part of a hearing for a preliminary injunction on the bans.

By Nadine El-Bawab
Video by Jessie DiMartino
July 20, 2023

On the second day of a hearing over a lawsuit filed against the state of Texas, physicians who practice medicine outside the state testified on Thursday that Texas' abortion laws are confusing and would make it difficult to provide necessary care to patients.

They were joined by a physician in Texas who was pregnant herself and delivered emotional testimony about having to go out of the state to get an abortion.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/US/doctors-testify-confusion-surrounding-texas-abortion-bans/story?id=101521408

Women suing Texas over abortion bans give emotional testimony

The fifth woman's testimony will be heard on Thursday.

By Nadine El-Bawab and Mary Kekatos
July 19, 2023
Four plaintiffs began the first day of testimony Wednesday as part of a lawsuit filed against the state of Texas, saying the state's abortion bans put their lives in jeopardy.

The women are some of the 15 individuals party to the lawsuit who have alleged they were denied lifesaving emergency care due to Texas' abortion laws.

Lawyers representing the women are seeking a preliminary injunction on Texas' abortion laws that would allow for lifesaving abortions. They are asking the court to provide a "remedy applied to patients whose life, health or fertility is at risk from an emergent medical condition," Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights and lead attorney on the case, said during opening statements Wednesday.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/US/women-suing-texas-abortion-bans-court-testify/story?id=101487004

Denied abortion for a doomed pregnancy, she tells Texas court: ‘There was no mercy’

July 19, 2023
Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR

AUSTIN, Texas – Samantha Casiano, who gave birth to a baby who lived just four hours, broke down and became physically ill on the witness stand as she told the story of her doomed pregnancy in an Austin, Texas, courtroom on Wednesday. Her husband, Luis Villasana, rushed to the front of the courtroom to help her, during a hearing in a case challenging the abortion bans in Texas.

Casiano was one of three women who gave dramatic testimony about their pregnancies in the case brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The case, on behalf of 13 patients and two doctors, argues that the medical exceptions to Texas' laws are unclear and unworkable for doctors in ways that harm patients and that the state has done nothing to clarify its laws.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/07/19/1188828153/denied-abortion-for-a-doomed-pregnancy-she-tells-texas-court-there-was-no-mercy

USA – You Cannot Hear These 13 Women’s Stories and Believe the Anti-Abortion Narrative

May 22, 2023
By Michelle Goldberg

It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there has been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies.

Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing. Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement for spooking doctors into not intervening when pregnancies go horribly wrong. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care is not or may not be permitted in these states, leading to provider confusion and poor outcomes for women,” said a report by the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/opinion/abortion-law-texas-lawsuit.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