Texas women give harrowing testimony on impact of extreme abortion ban

Texas women who were denied abortions took the stand and delivered harrowing testimonies of their experiences of carrying life-threatening pregnancies as a result of the state’s high restrictive abortion laws.

The women are part of a lawsuit filed in March by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which is seeking clarification on which situations fall under the “medical emergency” exception in Texas’s abortion bans. The lawsuit appears to be the first of its kind in which women who were denied abortions are suing a state since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year.

In addition to losing their medical licenses, doctors who perform abortions in Texas can face fines of up to $100,000 as well as life in prison.

“Even if they provide an abortion that they believe complies with the ban’s narrow exceptions, they still risk the laws being enforced against them,” the plaintiffs argued in court filings.

Related: Nebraska teen sentenced to 90 days in jail for burying fetus she aborted

During Wednesday’s hearing, plaintiff Samantha Casiano delivered an emotional testimony about being forced to give birth to a baby who died four hours later as a result of a fatal birth defect.

Twenty weeks into her pregnancy, Casiano discovered that her baby had anencephaly, a rare condition in which parts of the baby’s skull and brain are missing. Casiano said that doctors informed her that they were unable to perform an abortion in the state and that she was instead given funeral home information.

“I felt like I was abandoned,” Casiano said. “I had this funeral home paper and this is just supposed to be a scan day.”

Casiano went on to describe her thought processes upon learning about her baby’s condition, telling the court that she considered getting an abortion out of state but was also afraid of losing her job or being jailed.

“I felt like I was imprisoned in my own body,” she said.

At one point, as Casiano read aloud a doctor’s note about her high-risk pregnancy, she became overwhelmed and vomited during the hearing. Following a recess, Casiano returned to the stand and said that recalling the events “just makes my body remember, and it just reacts”.

“I now have a psychiatrist … I now vomit a lot more. I’ve never vomited before like that, ever, before my pregnancy. My body’s never reacted that way,” she added.

Another plaintiff, Amanda Zurawski, recounted her experiences of developing sepsis after she was refused an abortion when her water broke at only 18 weeks. Zurawski said her doctor told her that a miscarriage was inevitable but because her fetus still had a heartbeat, they could not induce labor.

Zurawski, who wanted to seek an abortion out of state, said her situation was so severe doctors said she had to stay within 15 minutes of a hospital.

“I had to listen to her heartbeat, simultaneously wanting to hear it and not wanting to hear it at the same time … If it stopped, they would be able to intervene,” Zurawski testified, according to the Texas Tribune.

Eventually, when Zurawski started developing septic shock, she was rushed to the hospital where doctors finally agreed to induce labor.

“I went from feeling physically OK to shaking uncontrollably. I was freezing cold even though it was 110F out. My teeth were chattering violently. I couldn’t get a sentence out. My husband Josh asked me how I was feeling on a scale from one to 10. I didn’t know the difference between one and 10 – which one was higher,” she said, according to ABC News.

Zurawski, who ended up delivering a deceased baby, said that as a result of the whole ordeal, she has been left with scar tissue and a fallopian tube which has permanently closed.

Ashley Brandt was another plaintiff who delivered emotional testimony. Brandt said she was forced to leave Texas and go to Colorado for an abortion after one of the twins she was carrying was diagnosed with acrania, a rare and fatal condition in which the fetal skull is absent.

“If I had not gone out of state and had just done what was legal in Texas, my daughter Marley would most likely be in the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit] because she would have been born before 37 weeks. All my ultrasounds up to labor I would have had to watch twin A deteriorate more and more every week,” Brandt said, per ABC.

“I would have had to give birth to an identical version of my daughter without a skull and without a brain and hold her until she died. Then I would have had to submit a death certificate and plan a funeral and decide if I wanted to bury her or cremate her. It just would have been heartbreaking. But instead I got to just give birth to my healthy daughter,” she added.

Brand said that she does not “feel safe to have children in Texas any more”.

“I know that it was very clear that my health didn’t really matter, that my daughter’s health didn’t really matter, which was really heartbreaking,” she said.

Attorneys of the state have pushed back against the lawsuit, which includes more than a dozen women from Texas.

Amy Pletscher, an attorney for the state, told Associated Press the lawsuit was brought by women and doctors who “simply do not like Texas’s restrictions on abortion”.

She claimed that “the purpose of this court is not to legislate”.

Sixteen states, including Texas, do not allow abortions when a fatal fetal anomaly is detected, while six do not allow exceptions for the mother’s health, according to an analysis by KFF, a health research organization.

The lawsuit in Texas comes as abortion restrictions elsewhere in the US continue to face challenges. On Monday, an Iowa judge temporarily blocked the state’s new ban on most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, just days after Governor Kim Reynolds signed the measure into law.

The majority of US adults, including those living in states with the strictest limits on abortion, want it to be legal at least through the initial stages of pregnancy, according to a poll released in late June by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.