Five women in Texas have sued the state after being denied abortions while facing medical crises, illustrating how abortion bans can threaten the lives and health of pregnant people.
The lawsuit, which was filed Monday in state court by the Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of the women and two Texas physicians, asks the state to clarify exceptions to the bans.
Texas law allows doctors to provide abortion care in medical emergencies. But the lawsuit highlights how abortion bans can create a chilling effect for obstetric care, as physicians — worried about legal repercussions — refuse or delay care to pregnant people with serious complications.
Texas was one of the first states in the U.S. to implement a near-total abortion ban.
The law, which went into effect in September 2021, leans on a novel legal mechanism to curtail the procedure: empowering citizens to file civil lawsuits worth tens of thousands of dollars against any person who provided an abortion or helped someone get one.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and struck down the constitutional right to abortion last summer, roughly a dozen more state abortion bans have gone into effect. In Texas, an even stricter “trigger ban” went into effect, which makes nearly all abortions a felony with narrow exceptions allowing abortions to save the life of a pregnant person.
Since then, people with medically complex pregnancies have been turned away by physicians, resulting in life-threatening conditions in some cases, according to the lawsuit and news stories. The goal of the suit is to force Texas to provide clear guidelines for doctors when their pregnant patients face serious medical complications.
The five women named in the suit all wanted to keep their pregnancies, but faced extreme complications when denied abortion care.
Even after learning that her fetus was not viable at 17 weeks, Amanda Zurawski was forced to wait until she became septic to receive abortion care. As a result, she spent days in the ICU and one of her fallopian tubes permanently closed.
Another plaintiff, Anna Zargarian, was denied an abortion after her water broke at 19 weeks of pregnancy. She flew to Colorado for an abortion, fearing septic shock if she didn’t get the procedure.
Two more plaintiffs — Ashley Brandt and Lauren Miller — were both pregnant with twins. One of Miller’s twins was not viable, and she was forced to travel out of state for an abortion to save her life, and the life of her other baby.
Brandt also had to travel out of state for an abortion to save the life of one of her twins. Afterward, her doctor in Texas documented her condition as “vanishing twin syndrome,” too fearful to describe it as an abortion.
The plaintiffs “and countless other pregnant people have been denied necessary and potentially life-saving obstetrical care because medical professionals throughout the state fear liability under Texas’s abortion bans,” the lawsuit says.
In addition, two OB/GYNs — Damla Karsan and Judy Levison — are also suing the state, arguing they’re unable to provide abortions in some emergency situations due to worries regarding vaguely-worded state law. Doctors who violate the abortion bans can face severe penalties, like losing their medical license, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and up to 99 years in prison, according to the lawsuit.
The doctors and their colleagues “fear that prosecutors and politicians will target them personally and threaten the state funding of their hospitals if they provide abortion care to pregnant people with emergent medical conditions,” the lawsuit says.
In addition to the state of Texas, the lawsuit also names Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton as a defendant. Paxton’s office has been active in curtailing access to abortion outside of Texas, even suing the Biden administration last year over guidance that physicians must provide abortions to patients in an emergency.
Abortion access has become increasingly divided across the U.S., with red states looking to enact more rigorous bans and blue states scrambling to expand abortion access to out-of-state patients.
Abortion remains legal in more than half of U.S. states
In Florida — which already bans abortion after 15 weeks — Republican state lawmakers recently proposed banning the procedure after six weeks. The law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis has indicated he will sign, would curtail a major abortion access point in the South.
Meanwhile, in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said the state would no longer do business with Walgreens after the pharmacy chain said it wouldn’t dispense abortion pills in 20 states, following pressure from Republican attorneys general in those states.
