PREGNANT IN TEXAS

In an unprecedented lawsuit, a group of women take on their home state to save abortion rights for everyone.

- ROSE MINUTAGLIO

IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE MUCH. Just a fuzzy gray dot on the ultrasound. But the speck was an early sign that one of Ashley Brandt’s twins had acrania, a rare neurological disorder that is 100 percent lethal. Brandt needed to abort the unviable fetus to increase the other twin’s chance of survival. Because she lived in Texas, Brandt furtively crossed state lines in order to receive abortion care at 14 weeks pregnant. “It was all hush-hush, very secretive,” she says. Back home, doctors wouldn’t acknowledge what had happened, and her medical records incorrectly listed a “spontaneous abortion,” the medical term for a miscarriage. Now on the other side with a healthy eight-month-old baby girl, Brandt is done being made to feel afraid and guilty. “There’s nothing anyone can say to make me feel bad,” she says. “It saved my daughter’s life. She wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have an abortion.”

Brandt is one of 15 women suing the state of Texas. Thirteen of those women, including one who is an obstetrician herself, were refused abortion care despite complications that made it unsafe or even deadly to stay pregnant. Two others are ob-gyns suing because they say the law bars them from offering necessary care to their patients. The lead plaintiff, Amanda Zurawski, became septic before her life was deemed at risk enough for an abortion. “I was dying, essentially,” Zurawski says.

The lawsuit, backed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, is the first case against a state brought by people whose pregnancies were directly impacted by abortion restrictions implemented in the wake of the Supreme Court decision that overturned