Before a speaking event last week, I memorized everything I could about the near-death experience Amanda Zurawski endured while losing her pregnancy. Of the demand Zurawski filed a complaint with four other women about abortion bans in Texas. I learned that doctors, fearful of breaking the law, refused to terminate Zurawski’s pregnancy when she burst at 18 weeks. Days later, when she was having a miscarriage, her fever rose to 103.2 degrees. Zurawski’s relatives flew in to see her in the ICU because they believed she was dying.
As I recounted the details to the audience, I could see people shaking their heads at how the state of Texas almost killed that woman.
It has become a disturbing ritual of my profession, this chronicle of the labor pains of the near-dead woman. My notebooks are full of the measures of her suffering: the peak of the fever, the pain of the infected uterus, pain severe enough to make you arch out of bed as in The Exorcist, as described to me by another near-dead woman. How old is the almost dead woman, and is she a mother, and could we take a picture? For generations, the near-dead woman has been the archetypal patient deserving of an abortion. That archetype traces its roots to the late 19th century, when physicians wanting to prove their superiority over lay quacks advocated making abortion illegal unless a patient was close enough to death, a determination that varied widely and could only be taken by a doctor. Today in the postroe landscape, the 12 states ban abortion everyone makes an exception if you are, to varying degrees, almost dead. As the Texas lawsuit shows, these exceptions, when interpreted by medical providers with the threat of prison hanging over their heads, are not enough to protect even near-dead patients from ending up in the ICU or having to flee the state.
Of course, spawning enough near-dead people will inevitably lead to a certain number of deaths.
I wonder who she is, our dead woman.
In Ireland, her name was Savita Halappanavar. She was a dentist. Her water broke at 17 weeks, just like Amanda Zurawski’s. Doctors in Ireland told her they couldn’t terminate her pregnancy because the fetus was protected by Ireland’s Eighth Amendment as long as she still had a heartbeat. She begged for an abortion. Like Zurawski, she developed sepsis. So she died. She was 31 years old. Her death ignited a political revolution that liberalized Ireland’s abortion laws. Thousands of people demonstrated in the streets with banners with Savita’s portrait reading “Never Again”. Six years later, Irish voters repeated the Eighth Amendment in a referendum. Under the right circumstances, one kill is enough.
I wonder if our dead woman is reading good night Moon your young son after a long day at work. I wonder if she’s logging into online night classes with her feet in a pair of fuzzy slippers. I wonder if she’ll rage and cry at the unfairness of it all, when she finds out that the doctors in her state won’t help her unless she’s nearly dead. She may not be a woman at all, but a trans man or a non-binary person who has already faced medical professionals inclined to discriminate against her very being. In a country where black women seek abortions at higher rates and die far more commonly from maternal health complications, our dead woman is likely to be black, and therefore likely to know that her death will be worth less.
In 1977, Rosie Jimenez died in a McAllen, Texas hospital from a policy called the Hyde Amendment. The Hyde Amendment cut off most Medicaid funding for abortion. Jiménez had had a previous abortion paid for by Medicaid. After she passed the ban, she turned to an unsafe provider. Like Zurawski and Halappanavar, she developed an infection and then sepsis. A journalist named Ellen Frankfort wrote about Rosie’s final moments. She turned a “dark greenish-brown color.” Blood came out of her eyes. She had an undeposited scholarship check in her purse at the time of her death. However, some abortion rights activists hesitated to support Rosie.
“Mainly white, middle-class, traditional abortion groups learned that she might not be a sympathetic figure,” wrote veteran abortion rights activist Frances Kissling, who tipped off Rosie’s death to Frankfort, in the book that wrote with Frankfort, Rosie: The Investigation of a Wrongful Death. She “was a Mexican-American, a single mother in a border town known for illegal drug trafficking, and had apparently been pregnant several times before.” Additionally, activists had predicted many deaths from the Medicaid ban. “But all we could point to was a single death,” Kissling wrote. The Hyde Amendment lives on to this day.
It’s not new, this search for a dead woman. As journalists, we are taught to go after the most extreme examples of a policy’s impact. For years, with roe v. calf intact, I wrote about how Catholic hospitals that follow religious directives and even public hospitals in states like Texas subject patients to near-death tests due to restrictions on abortion. i wrote about Alison in Washington state, the woman who arched out of bed in pain from an infected uterus. I wrote about a Texas woman so sick she couldn’t walk, that she was denied an abortion on the grounds that she was not dead enough. I sat across from the women and asked them to describe her suffering in detail. How dead were you? The more dead the better, for my purposes; I’m trying to make people care about you.
I wish I had only undead women, vibrant women to write about, women like Angel Kai, mother of three and storyteller for the reproductive justice group WeTestify. She told me how her abortion allowed her to escape an abusive relationship. She now keeps her three daughters in a home that she is proud of. She makes flashcards for her daughters; she makes them handmade bows. The safety of a pregnant person, her dreams, her plans, kept or come true, these details also matter, not only if she is dead.
LLet’s go back to the almost dead women.
At a press conference in front of the Texas State Capitol in Austin, the plaintiffs laid out their ordeals with great dignity.
“I cannot adequately put into words the trauma and despair that comes with expecting to lose your life, your child’s life, or both,” said Amanda Zurawski. “For days I was locked in this strange and avoidable hell.”
He stood next to Lauren Hall, who is 28 and lives outside of Dallas. Hall was carrying a skullless fetus. She had to fly to Seattle to get the abortion. Lauren Miller is 35 years old and lives in Dallas. She was pregnant with twins, but one fetus could not survive because she had fluid-filled sacs where her brain should have been. She had to fly to Colorado to have an abortion. Anna Zargarian is 33 years old and lives in Austin. She ruptured her bursa at 19 1/2 weeks, and when she miscarried in Colorado, her fever was 101. Fearing prison and civil lawsuits, providers in Texas had refused to provide abortions to all of these women, even though they The state prohibitions have an exception to protect the life or health of a pregnant person in medical emergencies.
In an article about the lawsuit, The New York Times wrote that these women “contradict stereotypes about who aborts and why. Married, and some with children already, the women rejoiced in their pregnancies, only to find that their fetuses had no chance of surviving.” Most of the people who abort are mothers. But this line seems to allude to the fact that these Women, most of whom appear to be white, fall into the general category of people who can expect the world to care when the state nearly kills them.
I wonder who she is, our dead woman.
When we find her, I’ll tell you all I can about her. How her family gathered around her, or if she was alone. How high her fever got, how bad her pain was, if she had blood in her eyes. I’ll tell you the details that will make her feel like your sister or your daughter: if she had a lisp or a dimple on one side, or if she loved dogs, and how she loved her children, and how much they will. I miss her. I am sure that when we find her, our dead woman, she will not be the first to have died, but the first that we have found.
I just hope she’s enough.