USA – I Was Forced To Carry A Baby I Knew Would Die — And It Nearly Killed Me, Too

"It was silent in the room when my son was pulled out of me. He couldn’t cry, open his eyes, or move."

By Melissa Schmitt
Nov 27, 2025

On Dec. 18, 2014, in Fargo, North Dakota, I walked drugged and disoriented through a hospital hallway decorated for Christmas. Music played — maybe from a piano, maybe over the PA system. I couldn’t tell. A few hours earlier, my newborn son had passed away less than 30 minutes after I had given birth. Shortly after that, I suffered a severe postpartum hemorrhage and a near-death experience.

Two liters of blood later, there I was, barely alive and walking through a holiday fog, wishing that I wasn’t.

Continued: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/abortion-ban-pateau-syndrome-pregnancy_n_68ed47b5e4b00067de8227a5

27.11.2025

Kate Cox begged Texas to let her end a dangerous pregnancy. She won’t be the last

Two years ago, a woman like Cox was able to control her body on her own terms. Now, she has to go before a court and beg

Moira Donegan
Tue 12 Dec 2023

In most cases, we would never have learned her name. Kate Cox, a Texas woman, is in a sadly common set of circumstances: a 31-year-old mother of two, Cox was pregnant with her third child when doctors informed her that something was wrong. Pregnancy complications are common, but in a state like Texas, they have become newly dangerous, threatening women with potentially disfiguring health complications, along with unimaginable heartbreak, as the state’s multiple bans have mandated grotesque and inhumane treatment of doomed pregnancies.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/12/kate-cox-emergency-abortion-texas

12.12.2023

Texas Supreme Court rules against woman who sought abortion hours after she says she’ll travel out of state

A state district judge granted the request last week, but the Texas Supreme Court directed the lower court to vacate its order Monday.

Dec. 11, 2023
By Daniella Silva and Aria Bendix

A Texas woman whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis and who was awaiting a decision from the Texas Supreme Court about whether she would be allowed to get an abortion said Monday that she has decided to leave Texas to get the procedure.

Kate Cox, a mother of two who is around 20 weeks pregnant, found out just after Thanksgiving that her developing fetus has trisomy 18, a fatal diagnosis. Seeking to terminate the pregnancy to protect her health and future fertility, she and her husband sought a court order to block Texas’ abortion bans from applying in her case.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-woman-sought-abortion-court-order-leave-state-rcna129087

Kate Cox explains why she is suing Texas over abortion law

Kate Cox, for the Dallas Morning News
Dec. 11, 2023

We have always wanted a large family, and after our 3-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son came along, Justin and I began planning and trying for one more.

Because both of my earlier pregnancies required C-sections, we knew this one and any subsequent pregnancy would be considered a higher risk to me and to the pregnancy.

Continued: https://www.ourmidland.com/opinion/voices/article/kate-cox-explains-suing-texas-abortion-law-18546890.php

11.12.2023

Opinion

abortion story

Center for Reproductive Rights

A Texas judge ruled a pregnant woman who sued the state seeking an abortion can legally terminate her pregnancy

By Ashley Killough, Ed Lavandera and Andy Rose, CNN
Thu December 7, 2023

…After the ruling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton warned Cox’s physician she could still face civil and criminal penalties at some point should she perform the court-ordered procedure.

… Molly Duane, Cox’s attorney, … said the fight is far from over, as the ruling only applies to Cox and does not “restore access” to abortion to thousands of other women. She called the state’s argument “callous in the extreme,” and said “they don’t care whether people live or die as long as they’re forced to give birth.”

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/us/texas-abortion-ruling/index.html

Texas Woman Asks Court to Allow Her Abortion

A woman who is 20 weeks pregnant, and whose fetus has been diagnosed with a deadly condition, is suing for an abortion under a medical exception to the state’s bans.

By J. David Goodman, NY Times
Dec. 5, 2023

A pregnant Texas woman whose fetus has a fatal condition sued the state on Tuesday seeking an emergency court order to allow her doctor to perform an abortion, despite the state’s strict bans on the procedure.

The lawsuit is believed to be one of the first attempts in the nation to seek a court-ordered abortion since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, allowing states to make their own abortion laws.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/texas-abortion-lawsuit.html

Muslim-American opinions on abortion are complex. What does Islam actually say?

February 1, 2023
LINAH MOHAMMAD

After the U.S. Supreme Court's decision that ended the constitutional right to abortion, Zahra Ayubi started to notice a theme among some critics of the historic shift.

"They'll draw analogies between abortion bans in the United States and Muslim conservatism," Ayubi, a professor of Islamic Ethics at Dartmouth College, said of some of the commentary she saw on TV and on social media. Critiques ranged from attempts at humor to outright Islamophobia.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/01/1152071397/muslim-abortion-islam-religion-united-states

01.02.2023

Commentary

Featured

Eman Abdelhadi

Institute for Social Policy and Understanding

Islam and abortion

madhab

Maryam Monalisa Gharavi

A Woman Wanted an Abortion to Save One of Her Twins. She Had to Travel 1,000 Miles.

“There was no decision, really, because the baby wasn't going to survive... I’m not going to leave my son without a mom.”

By Carter Sherman
November 28, 2022

Early one Friday morning, about six weeks into her pregnancy, a woman started throwing up and didn’t stop for more than 36 hours. She tried drink after drink—ginger ale, tea, Pedialyte—to rehydrate, but the woman kept vomiting. Once chills started to wrack her body, she decided enough was enough. The woman, who VICE News is calling A. for privacy reasons, needed to go to the emergency room.

A., who already has a toddler son, had already been nervous about being pregnant in her home state of Texas. Although A. and her husband had planned for this pregnancy, A. worried that if anything went wrong, Texas’ ban on abortion would prevent her from getting help.

Continued: https://www.vice.com/en/article/epz7ap/texas-abortion-ban-woman-travels-to-save-twin

28.11.2022

Commentary

Featured

abortion story

fatal fetal abnormality

Texas abortion ban

traveling for abortion

Her mother’s abortion was required under China’s one-child policy. Her own would be illegal under Tennessee’s post-Roe ban

by Eric Boodman
Sept. 29, 2022

It started as a joke. Jen was early in her first pregnancy, sitting with her husband after lunch. You know those gimmicky websites, he was saying, where you can name a star after someone and the person gets a certificate in the mail? What if, instead, we named our child after the biggest planet in the solar system?

He was kidding, but Jen kind of liked it. Jupiter. She liked the sound of it — and how awesome, to share a name with something so huge, encircled by so many moons. She hadn’t imagined herself as a mom. When they were looking at houses, she’d insisted on a yard for their dog; she hadn’t been thinking about room for kids. But then something in her shifted, and here they were, in their dining room, in a green-lawned Tennessee neighborhood, joking about what to call their first child. Jupiter was a perfect middle name — semi-secret, a nod to this wild gravitational pull.

Continued: https://www.statnews.com/2022/09/29/abortion-roe-tennessee-ban-fetal/

29.09.2022

USA – She ended a pregnancy so her child wouldn’t suffer. Now she helps others like her.

Emma Belle and other parents who experienced TFMR, or termination for medical reasons, are creating an online community to ease the grieving process

By Ashley Fetters Maloy
Apr 26, 2022

Emma Belle was hopeful about this pregnancy. Anxious, but hopeful. In their quest to have a baby, Belle and her husband had been through three rounds of ovulation induction, a miscarriage at five weeks and two rounds of intrauterine insemination. When she was still pregnant after a few months in late 2020, she began to allow herself to imagine actually parenting a child.

Then the bad news came. Belle, who lives part time in the United Kingdom and part time in Dubai, recalls that at her 12-week scan, “the sonographer’s face changed. She said, ‘I can’t not tell you what I can see.’ ” A genetic test later found a 99 percent chance the baby had Edwards syndrome, also known as Trisomy 18. Doctors told Belle that the baby would likely either die in utero before 28 weeks or live only a few hours or days.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/04/26/tfmr-pregnancy-termination-for-medical-reasons/

27.04.2022