According to the lawsuit, all five women faced the risk of hemorrhage or life-threatening infection from carrying the fetuses, however they denied “denied dignified treatment as equal human beings.” Five women sue Texas over the state's abortion ban:
Lauren Miller, who had to travel to Colorado to have an abortion for one of her twins, at home in Dallas, March 5, 2023.
The suit asks the court to affirm that physicians can make exceptions, and to clarify under what conditions. But its greater power may be in appealing to public opinion on abortion. Similar lawsuits over exceptions, focusing public attention on stories of women who were denied abortions despite medical dangers, helped build momentum for legalized abortion in heavily Catholic Ireland and in South America.
Anti-abortion groups argue that restrictions on abortion do not harm women’s health, that doctors can provide lifesaving care without needing to perform an abortion, and that the laws prevent only what the groups call “elective” abortions, or those that are intended to end an unwanted pregnancy. That is different, they argue, from the management of a miscarriage or ectopic pregnancy, situations that are often allowed under the exceptions in state abortion bans.
It quoted the Texas statute banning abortion unless there is “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy” that places the pregnant woman “at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.”
Unlike other suits from abortion rights groups, the Texas suit does not seek to overturn the state bans on abortion.
Few states have been more aggressively anti-abortion than Texas, the home of the original Roe case. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Texas passed a law allowing civilians to sue anyone who provided or aided and abetted an abortion, with rewards of at least $10,000 for successful suits. Three days later, doctors again told the Zurawskis they could not legally abort the fetus because it still had a heartbeat. At home that night, Zurawski developed a fever, and her husband called the obstetrician to ask to go to the hospital. “We were in this mindset of, ‘Surely now you’ll accept us,’ ” Zurawski said. A nurse told them, he said, that doctors would have to receive approval from the hospital’s ethics board.
Now receiving IVF treatments again, Zurawski said she was left with emotional scarring, as well. “Every ultrasound is going to be terrifying — not just scary, but traumatic,” she said. “Last time I heard a heartbeat inside of me, I was wishing for it to stop.”When she was six weeks pregnant, she suffered such bad nausea and vomiting that she went to the emergency room, where she discovered she was carrying twins.
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