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In Her Words: At Age 17, This Young Woman Fled Texas To Get An Abortion

In Her Words: At Age 17, This Young Woman Fled Texas To Get An Abortion

What follows is the story of DakotaRei Frausto, a young Native American woman forced to flee her home in Texas to obtain an abortion, as told to journalist Bonnie Fuller.

I was 17 when I found out that I was pregnant and was already about 8 weeks along. I was so overwhelmed because I had no idea of what my options were going to be, and I was afraid.

I was well aware that I wouldn’t be able to access an abortion in Texas. The Texas Heartbeat Act had been passed about six months before, in September 2021, and it had banned abortions in the state after about 6 weeks (when fetal cardiac activity could be detected).

At the time, I also felt ashamed. We’re told as teenagers that one of your very few jobs is to not get pregnant. And so I was upset with myself.

And of course, I had no clue of where to start, how I was going to pay for an abortion, how I was going to travel out of state and who I could even tell, because we had a ‘bounty law’ in Texas.

The bounty law meant that doctors who performed an abortion or helped a woman get one could be sued for at least $10,000, and I wondered if I was willing to put people close to me in danger of financial and legal repercussions for simply aiding and abetting in my abortion.

When I got pregnant, I had been with my partner, now my fiancé, Tanner, for two years and before we were ever sexually active we had discussed using protection and getting tested for STDs (sexually transmitted diseases).

I had seen a gynecologist, and told her that I wanted to be on hormonal birth control because I believed that I was suffering from Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD), which is a much more serious form of PMS.

I would have extremely painful periods and just be so fatigued. There would be times that I would have to leave school early or not go in at all because of the pain. Then sometimes I would completely miss my period for a whole cycle.

But she completely brushed off my concerns. She was like, periods are painful, you’ll get over it. She basically treated me like I was a promiscuous teenager, even though I was trying to be proactive about my reproductive health. Then she scheduled me for a pap smear and left.

So Tanner and I were using condoms and also using Fertility Awareness, which helps you track your ovulation so you can prevent pregnancy on your ‘fertile days.’

But because I sometimes missed periods and I was also suffering from chronic nausea at the time, it made it really difficult for me to recognize that I was pregnant in the first place. However, when I started throwing up more frequently and noticed that I had missed my period, I was like, okay, I should definitely take a test.

Tanner and I were in our senior year of high school, and when I saw that I was pregnant I called him immediately. We both knew that being parents and having children wasn’t our priority, so we knew that I would get an abortion.

I told him that I would call my mom and tell her. Reproductive health discussions were never a taboo with my mom. Whenever I first started asking questions about sex, she gave me the rundown—the sex education that Texas couldn’t.

In Texas public schools, we really only have "abstinence education." Basically, we’re just told, "don’t have sex."

When I asked my mom, ‘What do I do?’ she told me to call a local Planned Parenthood clinic and ask them. I was able to get phone numbers for a couple of out-of-state clinics, and then I just began calling. I had to ask about prices for the procedure and dates to make a booking so my mom and I could figure out the logistics.

But I still didn’t know how I would find the money to travel out of state. I decided to go on TikTok and I utilized trending hashtags and filters and I basically just told my story.

Since I was feeling lost and hopeless, I did the one thing I knew how to do as a young person, which is to utilize social media.

I talked about how painful it was being pregnant, the fact that I was extremely fatigued and how difficult and expensive it was to try to get an abortion. A lot of people really empathized with me and shared their own stories, and I ended up getting almost 40,000 views and raising $400.

It took about a week before my mom and I settled on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It would be a 700-mile, 11-hour drive but because the clinic had such a huge influx of patients from Texas, it was going to be about a month before I could get an appointment.

In the meantime, I was vomiting after every meal and was constantly dehydrated. It got to the point where I was fainting in the shower and I ended up getting diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum, which is very severe morning sickness that lasts all day.

I was living with my dad and I was still too afraid to tell him that I was pregnant and so I had to keep saying that I wasn’t feeling well and that I had the flu.

When I finally told my dad, he cried. He wasn’t upset with me, but he felt so disappointed in himself for not doing everything in his power to prevent me from getting pregnant, including helping me access more reliable birth control. Then he dipped into his savings to help contribute to the cost of the abortion and the trip that I would have to take.

My parents had never married. I lived with my mom after I was born but when my mom got sick and had to go into the hospital for a while when I was 3 or 4, my dad ended up bringing me to live with him and his then-wife, and I’ve been living with him ever since.

I’ve loved living with my dad and still live with him. He’s been a very big supporter and over the years we’ve gotten much closer.

Both my parents are Mescalero Apaches, and I now realize how much my ancestry comes into play in my identity, my values, and in the culture and history of who I am. It’s something that I love to embrace.

For the trip to Albuquerque, my mom’s friend lent us her car which was a lot bigger and would be more comfortable for my mom, Tanner and me.

Even though there were a lot of barriers to getting an abortion when you live in Texas, luckily I had a community to come forward and provide me with the resources to make it possible.

Tanner had told his mom about my pregnancy. Because we had already been together for about two years, my family and his family were very well acquainted and everyone loved each other.

His mom was fine with Tanner taking time off school for the trip and he held my hand on the drive there. He was absolutely very supportive. For me, my abortion made us stronger. Never once did it make us question our future together or our commitment to each other. It just affirmed it.

At the clinic, in the recovery room after the abortion, there were a bunch of other girls who were all from Texas. We started talking about our experiences and about our thoughts on the abortion ban, and about how it felt to know that New Mexico was a safe haven for abortion patients.

One girl, who was also 17, had to leave as soon as the medical providers said that she was alright. She had to catch a flight right back to Texas because she couldn’t afford a hotel for the night and at that moment, I was like, wow. My story was sad that I had to deal with Texas’ ban itself and then with the cost, which ended up being about $2,000 for a two-day trip, but other people faced even bigger obstacles to getting an abortion and they are obstacles that shouldn’t be in place at all.

When I was at the Albuquerque Planned Parenthood, I finally had a health care provider sit down with me and have the conversation about birth control that I had tried to have in Texas.

We talked about Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder, and she told me about a friend of hers who had it and was using Nexplanon—a long-term, extremely effective hormonal birth control method that had been very helpful to her.

I decided to try it and had the Nexplanon implant inserted under my skin there. It’s great because it will be effective at preventing pregnancy for at least three years, and I was able to get it completely free in Albuquerque since it was covered by family planning funding. Then I was also able to get STD testing for free.

I saw such a dichotomy between the health care landscape in Texas versus the health care landscape in New Mexico, where it was very much about preventative care. Plus never once was I treated condescendingly. The providers at the clinic were very honest, compassionate, and never judgmental.

On the drive back, I slept in Tanner’s lap. The procedure had been painless and fast, and I genuinely felt like an emotional weight had lifted off me.

For the first couple of weeks after the procedure, I actually stayed with Tanner’s family because my dad works long hours and Tanner was there at my beck and call to help me with whatever I needed. We are now engaged and he’s my biggest supporter.

I felt no regret about my decision. I knew I made the right decision. But it took a long time for my hormones to regulate and feel normal again. And I still felt like a failure because of how stigmatized teenage pregnancy is.

But over time, that depression and anxiety turned into a passion to address the issues of reproductive health. I saw that I had tried to be proactive about my reproductive health and I got shut down. Getting pregnant wasn’t my fault. I did as much as I knew how to do as a powerless teenager.

But the whole experience did instill a confidence in me that I now know that I am able to take care of myself.

Now at 19, and as an adult, I am working to ensure that other people don’t have to go through what I went through. I’m in my freshman year at San Antonio College majoring in public administration, and I’ve been doing internships in the communications and nonprofit fields.

I’m a digital intern with a Texas nonprofit started by former Texas senator and reproductive freedom advocate Wendy Davis. It’s called Deeds Not Words. (It supports young women who are working to have a public and political voice.)

We’ve been very focused on getting people in Texas registered to vote, and now that early voting has started, to get them out to the polls. It’s super exciting that a record number—18.62 million people—are registered to vote in this election. (EDITOR’S NOTE: That’s 5% higher than the 2022 election.)

Once I turned 18, I voted in every local election that came up but this will be my first general election, and I’m super excited.

I also began a fellowship with Advocates for Youth (a global organization working with youth leaders to fight for young people to have access to information about sexual health, in the interest of making informed decisions).

As part of that fellowship, I’m working with elected officials to formulate a bill that would make it mandatory for schools to provide menstrual education in Texas. That’s my goal. (Texas is one of just five states that requires parents to opt their children into sex education.)

I’ve realized how much a lack of menstrual education impacted my own success. I didn’t realize that periods weren’t supposed to be debilitating. And period pain is one of the leading causes of young women missing school.

Now that I’ve been on Nexplanon it has really helped me with my period pain, reduced my nausea, and regulated my hormones. It has allowed me to finally feel like a normal human and lead my best life.

I’m continuing to advocate for reproductive freedom and to share my abortion story at events like the ”Ride to Decide” reproductive bus tour this past summer, which had stops in San Antonio and Austin.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Ride To Decide bus tour went to nine different states where abortion is restricted and sponsored events to publicize how abortion bans are dangerously harming women’s reproductive health care.)

I really believe that abortion access is everyone’s issue, whether or not you are someone who can get pregnant.

Abortion isn’t about "life." This is part of a continuous attack on people’s rights and freedoms. Government shouldn’t be making black and white laws about what we can and can’t do with our bodies, because it ends up hurting people. We have seen that these laws aren’t about protecting women and protecting families. They’re about subjugating people.

A lot of people have asked me about moving out of Texas. But I love this state and the people in it. I just think that the people that represent it are not meeting our needs.

I want to be here and do the work to ensure that we make it better for everyone because there are so many people who can’t leave. I owe it to them and myself to stay and make it better. I have found my voice.

Reprinted with permission from Courier Texas

How The Texas Abortion Ban Endangers Lives Of Pregnant Women

How The Texas Abortion Ban Endangers Lives Of Pregnant Women

It was several days after Kyleigh Thurman thought she was successfully treated for an ectopic pregnancy at the Ascension Seton Williamson Hospital in Round Rock, Texas.

She thought that the nightmare that she had been living through during January and February 2024, with over a month of suffering from bleeding, cramping, weakness and dizziness, was finally over.

But a week after receiving an injection of a drug that was supposed to stop the fertilized egg from growing inside her fallopian tube, Thurman was hit by a blinding pain in her right side.

She was all alone.

“I felt like I had been stabbed in my right side. It was terrible pain for one, but also just the rapid loss of blood, I nearly lost consciousness,” Thurman later told The Cut.

“I was in a location that I thought, man, if I pass out, I thought, I’m not sure anyone’s going to find me or get here. I was just like, don’t die, stay conscious,” she added.

Somehow, with her mom on the phone, she managed to stay alert and drive herself to a hospital in Burnet County. But the facility didn’t have the staff or resources to treat her now life-threatening condition. Her fallopian tube had ruptured.

Thurman was rushed to Ascension Seton Williamson Hospital an hour away, where she was told her fallopian tube needed to be removed. Even as she bled heavily and pooled blood filled her abdomen, she was reluctant to undergo the procedure. Thurman wanted to preserve her fertility.

“I want to have kids and I wanted to keep my fallopian tube,” she later recounted in a TikTok video. That’s why she was glad to receive an injection of methotrexate, which was supposed to stop the ectopic pregnancy from growing a week before. It was supposed to be slowly re-absorbing into her body.

Unfortunately, that had come too late after days of delayed treatment at the hospital where she now faced surgery.

When Thurman balked at going under the knife, her OB-GYN, who was on call at the hospital when she arrived, laid out the urgency of her dire circumstances.

“You need a blood transfusion, you’re getting dangerously close to losing your life,” she told Thurman. “You’re going to have to have surgery or you’re going to bleed out.”

Thurman later told the Associated Press in a tear-filled interview, “That’s when I just kind of was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m dying.’”

The 35-year-old had already made multiple trips to hospital emergency rooms — twice to her hometown hospital and twice to the larger Ascension Seton Williamson Hospital in Round Rock.

But despite her own OB-GYN diagnosing an ectopic pregnancy based on blood tests and ultrasound results, the hospitals she visited kept discharging her without any treatment and told her to return a few days later.

Thurman’s experiences at the Ascension hospital were documented and filed in a complaint against the facility on Aug. 6 with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Thurman wants the agency to investigate the Texas hospital for refusing to provide her with treatment to stabilize her emergency medical condition and with failing to provide her with timely medical treatment to terminate her ectopic pregnancy.

She is represented by lawyers from the Center For Reproductive Rights, who contend in the complaint that the hospital violated the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, a law passed in 1986 that requires all hospitals with emergency rooms that receive Medicare funding to provide health-stabilizing care even if it requires an abortion.

Delays turn dire

Thurman and Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz — a 25-year-old Arlington native whose fallopian tube nearly ruptured in an ectopic pregnancy — are the latest Texan women to file complaints or lawsuits after suffering harm to their reproductive health after the state enacted a near-total abortion ban.

Texas now has one of the strictest abortion bans to become law since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade after 50 years and ruled that women no longer had a federal right to abortion. State legislatures can now enact their own abortion bans and restrictions.

Texas has banned abortions for its seven million women of reproductive age, from the moment of conception with no exceptions for rape, incest or health of the mother or if the mother is carrying a fetus with a fatal fetal anomaly.

Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly bragged that his three right-wing justices he appointed helped strip women of their reproductive rights and people in states could vote on the issue. That’s not the case in Texas.

While Thurman and Norris-De La Cruz, who filed her complaint on August 6 against the hospital who treated her, were legally able to be treated for an ectopic pregnancy in Texas, both experienced the same delays at hospitals before their conditions became dire.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an updated advisory in July 2022 that it was legal to remove an ectopic pregnancy in the state, despite the strict abortion ban. Then the Texas legislature passed House Bill 3058, providing doctors who terminate an ectopic pregnancy with an “affirmative defense” if they are prosecuted.

In other words, Texas doctors can still be charged for treating an ectopic pregnancy, but they have a legally recognized defense to the charge. But if a doctor loses, they face exceptionally harsh criminal penalties for performing an abortion, including up to 99 years in prison, the loss of their medical license, and a $100,000 fine.

Ectopic pregnancies aren’t viable. For Thurman and Norris-De la Cruz, the fertilized egg attached to their fallopian tubes where it was impossible for them to continue to grow.

In other cases of ectopic pregnancy, fertilized eggs can attach themselves to an ovary, on the cervix, in the abdomen or even in a scar from a previous C section instead of in the uterus.

Ectopic pregnancies can be deadly if not treated in time.They are the leading cause of death in the U.S. for pregnant women in their first trimester with a mortality rate of nine to 14 percent of all pregnancy-related deaths. Maternal mortality rates in Texas doubled between 1999 and 2019, even before the effect of the bans was felt in the state.

‘You can die from the bleeding’

Ectopic pregnancies become dangerous when “they grow big enough to rupture the fallopian tube causing a significant amount of bleeding internally into the abdomen,” according to Austin Dennard, a Dallas OB-GYN.

“You can die from the bleeding,” Dennard told Courier Texas. “These are pregnancies that needed to be acted on immediately.”

But that wasn’t what happened to Thurman when she first arrived with her partner at the Ascension hospital with instructions to ask for the methotrexate injection to treat her ectopic pregnancy.

She received an ultrasound that revealed a two-centimeter “rounded structure” on her right fallopian tube and no signs of a gestational sac in her uterus. In other words, there was no evidence of a pregnancy developing in her uterus.

Thurman’s OB-GYN also called the hospital and told doctors that her patient had an ectopic pregnancy and required the injection. Nevertheless, Thurman was sent home and told to come back for a check up in two days.

It was only on a return visit three days later when Thurman’s OB-GYN sent another doctor to the hospital to plead with the medical staff to provide the methotrexate injection, that it was finally administered.

Thurman said that before her own experience, she didn’t know about the state’s abortion ban and “it didn’t make sense to me why I couldn’t receive help. The experience was incredibly disempowering.”

Doctors ‘walking on eggshells’

But to Dennard, the experiences of Thurman and Norris-De La Cruz make sense given the abortion ban the legislature passed in 2021.

“When SB8 and the other bans were created, it gave physicians cold feet about treating abortions. These women are examples of how scared, terrified and confused providers are even with the Texas law redefining that it’s legal that an ectopic pregnancy is a medical exception,” Dennard said.

“There has been irreparable damage done from these abortion bans and not every physician is keeping up with the law. They’ve been told that abortions are banned in the state. It’s not the provider’s fault,” she added.

Doctors “are walking on eggshells,” Dennard added, concerned about another medical provider disagreeing with the diagnosis and raising a red flag about providing treatment.

Nancy Binford, an Austin OB-GYN, agreed that doctors are afraid to treat patients with reproductive health care issues due to the Texas abortion bans. She cited instances of doctors being afraid of their treatment being misunderstood and then potentially being reported to the hospital or another authority.

Binsford cited an example from her clinic in which a patient had a stillbirth and required a dilation and evacuation procedure to remove the fetus from the uterus. The correct medical terminology for a stillbirth is a “missed abortion,” and someone in the clinic misunderstood the diagnosis and reported the physician who treated the woman to the chief medical officer at the hospital, she said.

“But it’s never been against the law to care for a patient whose baby has already died,” Binsford said. “They’ve criminalized obstetric care in the state.”

Astrid Ackerman, an attorney for the Center For Reproductive Rights, said doctors face severe penalties for abortions so they are going beyond what’s been normally required to diagnose ectopic pregnancies. That slows down treatment.

“Even when there are exceptions to the law, doctors feel they have to over-document what care they are providing to prove they are ectopic pregnancies. The risk of prosecution is preventing doctors from doing their jobs to protect their patients,” Ackerman said.

Dennard and Binford said their pregnant patients are terrified of encountering a complication — whether it’s a miscarriage, a fatal fetal anomaly or a risk to their health — that may be difficult or not treatable in the state now.

“One hundred percent of my pregnant patients are afraid,” Dennard said. “It’s an extra stress to every stage of pregnancy. You don’t want it to, but these laws are stealing the joy out of pregnancy.”

“Women are afraid to get pregnant in Texas. There is a pervasive unease with pregnancy. Women in their 40s with high-risk pregnancies are very afraid. Those pregnancies are fraught with difficulties.”

Binford is also seeing women in their 20s asking for tubal ligations. “They don’t want to get pregnant in this world,” she said.

Cramping, bleeding and waiting

When Norris-De La Cruz had a positive pregnancy test in January, she and her boyfriend were excited. But once cramping and bleeding began, she went to an emergency room and learned she was either miscarrying or experiencing an ectopic pregnancy.

At Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital, she said she was denied care by two OB-GYNS for an ectopic pregnancy despite an ultrasound showing a six-centimeter mass, as well as complex fluid in her pelvis, and no gestational pregnancy sac in her uterus. Her fallopian tube was at risk of rupturing.

Norris-De La Cruz was told to return in 48 hours. But she and her mom, Stephanie Lloyd, were so desperate for treatment that they waited several hours until a new OB-GYN came on call. The emergency room physician recommended treatment for an ectopic pregnancy.

“I do not feel comfortable discharging her home and do not think that is in her best interest,” the doctor noted in her file.

Yet a third OB-GYN told her to go home and return in 48 hours. Lloyd told the Washington Post that she panicked, fearing that her daughter was going to die.

It was only through a stroke of luck that a friend’s OB-GYN agreed to examine Norris-De La Cruz and review her test results that afternoon. He immediately scheduled surgery at a different hospital.

The mass had grown so large that he was forced to remove most of her right fallopian tube and most of her right ovary. The fallopian tube had already started to rupture. If Norris-De La Cruz had waited much longer, she would have been “in extreme danger of losing her life,” Jeffery Morgan, the OB-GYN that treated her, told the Post.

“I was scared I was going to … lose my entire reproductive system if they waited too long,” Norris-De La Cruz said later. “I knew it could happen at any moment.”

Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital told the Post that the hospital’s top priority is “providing our patients with safe, high-quality care.”

“Treatment decisions are individualized based on a patient’s clinical condition and we believe the care provided to the patient in this case was appropriate,” the hospital said.

Ascension Hospital told The Cut that it declined to discuss the specifics of Thurman’s case but that it denied the allegations.

Ackerman said that the Health and Human Services department opened an investigation into the complaints that could last months. If the hospitals violated federal law, the facilities could lose their Medicare funding.

“We are hoping that with these complaints this won’t happen to other pregnant women in Texas,” she said.

Norris-De La Cruz said the state’s abortion ban is also to blame.

“The doctors knew I needed an abortion, but these bans are making it nearly impossible to get basic emergency healthcare. I’m filing this complaint because women like me deserve justice and accountability from those that hurt us,” she told the Associated Press.

Thurman, in a TikTok video, said she “lost a piece of my womanhood.”

“I had to fight like hell to get my care and even with all the fight I had, I still didn’t get it fast enough,” she added.

Bonnie Fuller is a contributing writer to Courier Newsroom, Ms. magazine. and The Free Press, covering politics and reproductive freedom. She is the former CEO of HollywoodLife.com and former editor-in-chief of US Weekly, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and YM magazines. Please consider subscribing to Your Body, Your Choice, her free Substack newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from Courier News Texas

Two Georgia Moms Were The First Women Killed By Abortion Bans

Two Georgia Moms Were The First Women Killed By Abortion Bans

Amber Thurman was a beautiful 28 year-old single mom in Atlanta with a beaming smile and an adorable six year -old son. She was a medical assistant with big plans to become a nurse.

But on August 20, 2022 she was dead, her uterus ravaged by a sepsis infection from an incomplete abortion. For 20 hours doctors at an Atlanta hospital delayed providing her with a life-saving dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure. By the time surgeons got her into the operating room, they were racing to try to save her life.

Just two weeks before that, Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp had. signed the state’s new “Heartbeat” abortion ban into law and announced that he was “overjoyed” that the ban would keep Georgia women “safe” and “healthy.”

Abortions could no longer be practiced in the state after a fetal heartbeat was detected, usually around six weeks, unless a woman was a victim of rape or incest or at risk of dying. The criminal penalty for medical providers who didn’t adhere to the strict guidelines was up to 10 years in prison and the revocation of their medical licenses.

The result for for Amber who arrived by ambulance after vomiting up blood and passing out at home, was that she didn’t didn’t quickly receive what had just recently been a routine D & C to clear her uterus. Her case was now a frightening hot potato for the doctors at the hospital.

Was she close enough to death to meet the new law’s requirement when her white blood count and her blood pressure fell dangerously low? How about when antibiotics weren’t enough to curb her “acute sepsis’ infection? Or when she became at risk for bleeding out? Or when her vital organs began to fail?

When was she close enough to death to qualify for a legal abortion under Georgia’s ban?

By the time the hospital physicians believed they were meeting the new law’s standard, Amber died on the operating table.

This loving young mother tragically became the first known American woman to die from a Trump abortion ban less than two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24, 2022 by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

It only took two months.

However, her “preventable” death has just now became public more than two years later, when the ProPublica news outlet published the news after they obtained a report from the official Georgia state committee which investigates maternal deaths.

The committee which reports to the state’s Department of Health conducted a two year examination of the circumstances of Amber’s death which followed a rare complication from her two-pill abortion medication regime.

She received the pills when she drove to a North Carolina clinic four hours away, where abortion was still legal. Only 32 deaths have been linked to medication abortion pills between 2000 and 2022 and almost 6,000,000 American women have used them. They are considered safer than Viagra.

Unfortunately in Amber’s case, the pills failed to expel all the fetal contents from her uterus. It’s because the young woman didn’t receive the known standard of care -- the D & C -- quickly for her dire condition that the committee ruled that her death was “preventable.”

Now make no mistake -- this is what America’s women and those who love them must accept. Abortions bans cause young, healthy women to die. Death is now a risk for ANY pregnancy in the 22 states that have enacted the Trump bans.

And if the former president is re-elected on November 5, death will be a chance that every woman of reproductive age will take in America every time she decides to get pregnant or accidentally becomes pregnant.

That’s because Donald Trump -- no matter how many times he tries to confuse you about his stance on abortion -- WILL end it nationally, just as his Christian nationalist and evangelical followers have demanded.

You must have noticed how Trump is proudly crowing that HE’s The One who was able to “kill Roe V Wade” after 50 years. HE’s the one who appointed the three ultra right ring judges that he knew would do it. He promised to do it and he did!

If Trump and ‘pro life’ zealot JD Vance are elected, abortion in America is over.

If the pair can do it legislatively they will. If not, they’ll follow their Project 2025 handbook and ‘backdoor’ their ban. Their compliant Justice Department will enforce the 1873 Comstock Act, preventing the transportation of any abortion medications or surgical equipment across state lines.

Then on top of that, Trump’s obedient appointed FDA chief will withdraw the abortions pills as well as several forms of popular birth control from the market.

Done.

Women like Amber and Texans Amanda Zurawski, Kate Cox, Dr. Austin Dennard, and Madysyn Anderson, Tennessean Allie Phillips and Floridian Anya Cook and millions of women in the 22 Trump abortion ban states already know what it’s like to have no right to make decisions about their bodies.

They’ve been forced to flee to other states for abortions of unviable babies to save their own lives. They’ve lost their fertility after sepsis ravaged their reproductive organs when their water broke at 18 weeks. They’ve been left to bleed out in public restrooms after miscarriages until they were close enough to death for doctors to legally treat them .

Meanwhile in Amber’s state of Georgia, OBGYNs are practicing “under an element of fear," as Dr. Didi Saint Louis, an Atlanta OBGYN, confirms to me. “You don’t know what situation you might encounter that could land you in jail or cause you to lose your medical license.”

“I shouldn’t have to be fearing that I will go to jail when I’m treating patients. I can see why women would be afraid to seek care and to be honest about their situations so we can treat them as effectively as possible,” says the doctor, who has been practicing for more than 20 years. “Some women don’t know what the law is. It’s confusing.”

She stresses that since Georgia’s abortion ban was enacted, doctors feel like “we have our hands tied behind our backs.” And while she doesn’t understand why the hospital and doctor who treated Amber delayed urgent care for so long, she explains that after the law was enacted “we were uncertain and confused about how to interpret the law and how we could provide care.”

“We were scrambling to understand it.”

She says the abortion ban adds delays to the care of patients with complications, miscarriages, incomplete abortions, and other conditions which require consultations with hospital leadership, risk managers, and lawyers before proceeding.

“Sometimes it makes it difficult to practice medicine.” in Georgia admits the doctor who is a member of the Committee to Protect Health Care’s National Reproductive Freedom Task Force.

And sometimes she has to tell pregnant patients with serious health risks that they may have to leave the state to get an abortion.’

An Atlanta mom of three, 41, Candi Miller, didn’t leave the state when she accidentally got pregnant again. She suffered from debilitating lupus, diabetes and hypertension. To save her life, she ordered abortion pills online, but like Amber she tragically didn’t expel all he fetal tissue from her uterus.

When the excruciating pain set in from an infection she was too terrified by the state’s new abortion ban to see a doctor. She suffered for days taking strong painkillers until on November 12, her husband found her dead in her bed, next to her three year-old daughter.

An autopsy ruled that her death was caused by the combination of painkillers she consumed as she suffered.

Her son told ProPublica that the family believes she could have gotten “jail time “ if she was caught “trying to do anything to get rid of the baby.”

JD Vance just told a rally that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wadewas a “victory” and that “the Republican Party is proud to be the ‘pro life’ and ‘pro family’ party."

Tell that to Amber and Candi’s children who lost their mothers.

When it takes two years to investigate the deaths of pregnant women, we should be prepared -- how many American women have already died?

Donald Trump asked his followers at a Long Island, New York rally on September 18, “What the hell do you have to lose?” if you vote for him.

If you’re a woman of reproductive age, the answer is clear: It could be your life.

Bonnie Fuller is a contributing writer to Courier Newsroom, Ms. magazine. and The Free Press covering politics and reproductive freedom. She is the former CEO of HollywoodLife.com and former editor-in-chief of US Weekly, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and YM magazines. This is reprinted with permission from Your Body, Your Choice, her free Substack newsletter.

Texas Abortion Ban Almost Killed A Young Woman -- Now She's Fighting Back

Texas Abortion Ban Almost Killed A Young Woman -- Now She's Fighting Back

“I can’t carry a pregnancy again,” Amanda Zurawski says sadly, but matter of factly. The Austin, Texas resident will never be able to carry a pregnancy again because she was refused a necessary abortion in her state after her water broke at 18 weeks, long before her baby would have been viable.

Tragically, the delay in receiving what used to be normal health care allowed a massive bacterial infection to develop and turn into life-threatening sepsis – which ravaged her body and reproductive organs.

But that’s what life is now like in the post-Roe world for pregnant women who run into serious pregnancy complications in Texas and 13 other Republican-led states. These states have all banned abortions with virtually no exceptions unless the mother is on the verge of death.

Amanda can thank Texas’s three draconian abortion bans for her own brush with death – and a future in which she can never risk pregnancy again. Amanda’s baby girl still had a heartbeat after her mom-to-be’s amniotic sac ruptured prematurely at 18 weeks – a condition called PPROM (premature rupture of the membranes) – so her doctor was not legally able to give her an abortion in Texas and was forced to send her home to wait.

What she awaited was the development and spread of an inevitable bacterial infection throughout her uterus and then her body. Amanda and her husband Josh had no choice but to sit nervously at home for three days while toxic bacteria grew, and then swiftly turned into a dangerous and damaging case of septic shock that ruined her reproductive organs. The sepsis also killed her fetus – and only then could an abortion be provided as a ‘medical emergency’ exception in Texas.

Before the procedure could be performed, Amanda twice went into septic shock, a condition that has a frightening 60 percent mortality rate. She only survived thanks to the heroic efforts of her doctors.

Now, the 36 year-old, an account manager in the tech industry, is the lead plaintiff in Zurawski v State of Texas and along with 21 other co-plaintiffs she is anxiously a decision from the Texas Supreme Court to decide whether it will ‘clarify’ the scope of the ‘medical emergency’ exceptions allowed under the state’s abortion bans.

Amanda’s journey, from grieving mom of a baby she had desperately wanted, to a lawsuit against the state of Texas, began as she lay in her hospital bed recovering from the physically and emotionally traumatic experience. After doctors had spent a grueling three days battling to save her life in the ICU, she and Josh began talking about what they could do to change Texas’s abortion laws so that other women wouldn’t suffer the horror she had been through.

“We were like – we need to do something immediately,“ she told theAmerican Journal News in an exclusive interview. But the couple had no idea at the time that she would end up taking legal action against the state, let alone elevating it all the way up to the Texas Supreme Court.

She and Josh did realize, as she fought to regain her strength after undergoing an abortion, a blood transfusion and massive doses of antibiotics, that “as insane as it sounds, my scenario is the best version of this story because I had all the resources to survive sepsis,” she says.

She points out that she was lucky to have a devoted husband at home, ready to rush her to the emergency room as soon as her fever spiked and she became incoherent – which happened suddenly, three days after her water broke.

“But what about people who are at jobs, or who have other children and can’t find childcare, or don’t have a spouse that can get them to a hospital.They’re going to die. That’s going to be the outcome for a lot of people if things don’t change,” she fears.

She decided that she had a responsibility to tell her story. “If we don’t speak out, it’s not going to get better … so I really do feel like this is not where I want to be in life, but this is what life has dealt me. I feel very passionately that this is my duty. This is why I’m on earth – to fight this fight for so many.”

First, Amanda went public with her harrowing story, speaking to a media outlet and as word spread about her nightmarish experience, she was approached by lawyers from the Center for Reproductive Rights who wanted her to consider taking legal action. At first, she thought that the idea of suing the state of Texas was ‘‘madness”. But about five minutes into the meeting “my mind was changed. It was like, yeah, we’re doing this,’ she remembers. She says the center’s legal team “helped me see the importance of doing this.”

With full support from Josh, Amanda signed on to the lawsuit along with six other women who had been forced to give birth to infants that couldn’t survive outside the womb or who had to flee the state for abortions, as well as two plaintiffs who are obstetrician-gynecologists.

The OBGYNs joined in the legal action because the abortion ban ‘prevented them from meeting their ethical obligations as physicians and providing the medical care their patients needed’, according to the Zurawski v State of Texas lawsuit overview published by the Center For Reproductive Rights.

The suit was filed on March 6, 2023 and on May 22, eight more Texas women joined the groundbreaking case.

Amanda admits that she was nervous despite a lot of preparation before finally testifying in court when a hearing was held in a Texas state courtroom on July 19 and 20.

“I knew the state’s defense team was probably not going to be very nice. What I wasn’t prepared for was how excruciatingly detailed the questioning was going to be,” she admits. “They wanted me to recount very horrific pieces of my story. They wanted to know exactly when the baby’s heart stopped beating. It was just gruesome.”

The inhumanity of the trial got even worse when, she says, the Texas state defense team relentlessly tried to make the point that Amanda had “no standing” to challenge the abortion law because she probably couldn’t be pregnant again.

In other words, she and some of the other plaintiffs were in a cruel catch-22. They couldn’t be pregnant in the future because the Texas abortion law had taken away their fertility and now the state was saying that because they couldn’t give birth to a baby again, the law could no longer affect them, so they didn’t have the right to sue.

This was particularly brutal for Amanda, who was distraught that sepsis had left such massive scarring on her reproductive organs that both of her fallopian tubes were completely blocked and her uterus had collapsed. She and Josh had wanted a family so much.

Her reproductive endocrinologist was able to surgically unblock one of her tubes and he rebuilt her uterus in surgery after surgery. But it’s still not safe, she explains, for her to carry again because “my anatomy essentially has been permanently compromised.”

“How is that pro-life for my future children and my future family? How is what happened to some of the plaintiffs who joined my case? And their children? How is it pro-life that they had to be carried to term, and then they suffered for hours after being born and then slowly suffocated to death?” she asks, referring to Samantha Casiano, a fellow plaintiff whose baby suffered from anencephaly, a condition in which a baby doesn’t develop part of its brain and skull, and died shortly after birth. Samantha was denied an abortion and was forced to give birth to a daughter, “Halo”, who was immediately gasping for air and died within hours.

Despite the difficulty of testifying, Amanda says the experience was nevertheless “empowering,” because “there were so many of my fellow plaintiffs in that courtroom at the same time. We hadn’t been together before and just feeling our collective strength and determination to fight was amazing.”

Unfortunately, the joy of hearing the Texas district judge issue an injunction last August 4, blocking the Texas abortion bans as they apply to dangerous pregnancy complications, was extremely brief. The state immediately appealed the ruling under the direction of Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, a persistent opponent of reproductive choice for women.

Amanda’s next hearing was before the state Supreme Court on November 28. By then seven more Texas women had joined the lawsuit, so the plaintiffs now numbered 22. Although Amanda didn’t need to testify again, the courtroom experience wasn’t any less infuriating. One of the state’s lawyers didn’t even appear familiar with the terrible medical issues each of 20 of the plaintiffs had experienced, when they were denied abortions.

“It was very indicative of how the state [of Texas] feels about us. They don’t give us any sort of credibility. It really shows how they feel about the lives of pregnant people in Texas,” she points out.

“They just don’t care.”

Amanda says she was hopeful at first that Kate Cox, the Texas mom of two, pregnant with a baby suffering from a fatal condition which threatened her future fertility, would be considered a ‘medical emergency exception’ under the state’s restrictive laws. A federal district judge did rule that the 31 year-old was eligible for an abortion, but once again the state’s far-right Attorney General intervened.

Paxton immediately obtained an emergency injunction against the ruling, threatened to charge hospitals and any doctor who gave her the abortion with a felony, and then appealed the case to the Texas Supreme Court.

Amanda is disgusted with Paxton. “He’s essentially saying that he, who is not a medical doctor, knows more about medicine than actual medical doctors and he should be the one making these decisions,” she says. She laughs ironically when she’s asked if she feels like she’s living in a real life ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ in Texas. “It feels like I’m trapped in some sort of dystopian novel”.

Physicians and hospitals don’t dare violate Texas’s three strict abortion laws for some very clear reasons. Doctors face fines of up to $100,000, prison sentences of up to 99 years, and can also have their state medical licenses revoked. All of which explains why there have only been about 34 abortions performed in Texas — a state of almost 30 million people — since the bans were imposed. Before the three new abortion bans, there were more than 50,000 abortions a year in the state.

When the Texas Supreme Court denied Kate Cox an abortion, a disappointed Amanda told the American Journal News, “It’s so frustrating that we are no closer to giving doctors the clarity they need to help patients like me or Kate. Without clarity, people are left living in fear of prison or losing their livelihood.”

Kate Cox quietly fled Texas to get her medically necessary abortion.

Since the Zurawski v State of Texas lawsuit began, Amanda and Josh have lived through the sad anniversary of the loss of their beloved baby girl and her own emergency hospitalization.

She confesses that the year has been difficult for her husband Josh in a way that was different from her. “On the anniversary, I was obviously mourning the loss of our baby. But something he shared with me was that it was really difficult for him since he was not only mourning the loss of our baby but he was reliving that day and what it did to me. He lost a child and he almost lost his wife.”

She admits something that it is really sad and hard for her to share publicly. “Josh has already told some of our friends who are family planning, that as well as making a plan for when to try to have children, and a plan for where you are going to deliver and what’s going to be on your delivery playlist, now you also have to have a plan for what you’re going to do if things go south. How are you going to get out of the state if you need to?That’s the sad reality. It’s not something anybody wants to think about , but that’s the reality that our [Republican] lawmakers have put us in.”

Texas currently has a Republican Governor, two Republican U.S. senators, and Republicans control both the Senate and the House of Representatives in the state legislature.

With that in mind, Amanda hopes that by acting as the leading plaintiff in this lawsuit against Texas, that she is encouraging people to come out and vote in upcoming elections for the “right people”, who support a woman’s right to choose.

In the meantime, she awaits a decision from the Texas Supreme Court, which could clarify when the state’s doctors can legally provide abortions without repercussions.

Marc Hearron, the senior counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights, who has represented both Amanda and Kate Cox, says he is feeling “cautiously optimistic that the court will provide more clarity.”

While he acknowledges that the judges appear to view “medical exceptions’ very narrowly,” he says they didn’t comment in Cox’s case on Constitutional arguments that the Center has put forward.

He points out that the Texas Constitution provides pregnant people with ‘a right to life’: “A Texan cannot be deprived of life and liberty.” There is also an equal protection clause in the state constitution and therefore “pregnant people deserve equal rights to other Texans”, he insists.

If the Texas Supreme Court rules against Amanda and her co-plaintiffs, there is unfortunately no more legal action that can be taken on their behalf, he explains. In that case, Hearron says that “the people of Texas have to put pressure on politicians and change who they elect. It’s in their hands.”

While waiting for the court’s decision, aside from using her voice, Amanda has honored her daughter along with her husband Josh, by naming her and memorializing her in a very special way.

“When Josh and I were in the hospital, we talked about whether to name her and I said it would be really nice to name her after a plant or flower or tree that we could plant in the yard of the new house we had just bought,” she says.

The couple decided on the name “Willow” since the Desert Willow is native to Texas, Weeping Willows are native to Indiana, the couple’s home state, and the meaning of the name is “strength.”

“We also felt that it was very fitting for us because you can take the roots of one willow and use those to plant new willows. So we like to think we’re going to take her roots to plant our future babies.”

Amanda reveals that because she can no longer support a pregnancy in her own uterus, that she and Josh have done a number of rounds of IVF and were thankfully able to create some embryos.

“We are hopeful that we will still have children, but will have to have somebody help us out with that,” she confided. “We’re hopeful we will have something exciting in 2024.”

Bonnie Fuller is the former CEO and editor-in-chief of HollywoodLife.com & former editor-in-chief of Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire & USWeekly. She is now writing about reproductive freedom and politics.

Reprinted with permission from American Journal News.