What does the Bible really say about abortion?                                                                          1

What the Bible actually says about abortion may surprise you                                                 4 

ABORTION IN THE BIBLE  (Focus on the Family)                                                                       7

When does life begin? What different religions say about abortion                                        11

Jews, Abortion, and the Hebrew Bible                                                                                        16                                                                                                                                                                   Think Christianity Is Anti-Abortion? Think Again                                                                      23

The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth                                                                                27

Champion of the unborn                                                                                                               31

Roman medical care including “embryotomy”                                                                          32

DOES A FETUS HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS?                                                                  35

You’ll Never Guess When Pro-Life Hospitals Consider “Unborn Life” Not Actually Alive     43

Republican’s Life-Threatening Pregnancy Collided With Florida’s Abortion Politics             45

Florida abortion law                                                                                                                       49

Texas Abortion Laws                                                                                                                     51

Ticking Time Bomb - Abortion in Texas                                                                                       61

Idaho Abortion Ban                                                                                                                       70

Woman’s arrest after miscarriage in Georgia                                                                             80                                                                       

1                                                                                                                   

What does the Bible really say about abortion?

Christians who turn to Scripture to trump political debates on abortion should be reminded that the Bible does not actually say anything at all on the topic. On this issue there is no divine revelation to be had.

October 16, 2020

By John J. Collins

(RNS) — One of the standout images of contemporary politics is that of President Donald Trump, probably the most profane person to ever occupy the White House, holding a Bible in front of a boarded-up St. John’s Lafayette Church, a sign to his evangelical Christian supporters of his unwavering bond with them.

That bond hangs on the president’s championing of evangelicals’ pro-life beliefs. It’s that same impulse that has brought Amy Comey Barrett, a conservative Catholic, to the doorstep of the Supreme Court. Regardless of the president’s personal morality, the argument runs that Trump backs “biblical values” and so can be viewed as an agent of God.

It’s worth noting at this pass in American history that the supposed “biblical values” he champions often have little basis in the Bible. This disconnect is nowhere more evident than in the debate about abortion and the supposed “right to life.”

The Bible’s ambivalence on the subject of a right to life begins in its first book, Genesis. In chapter 9, God tells Noah after the flood: “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed, for in his own image God made humankind.”

Since human beings are created in the image of God, life is protected, but the penalty for bloodshed is more bloodshed. God can even demand human sacrifice on occasion, most famously in the case of Abraham and Isaac, and the death penalty is routinely in the Bible for all sorts of offenses. The Bible, in fact, lacks any discourse of human rights. Life is a gift from God: The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

2

The debate about a right to life is not primarily concerned with the death penalty, however, but with abortion. Given the importance conservative Christians, Catholic and Protestant, have granted abortion in recent years, some might assume that their own opposition stems, in some way, from biblical teachings. But in the entire corpus of biblical law, abortion is never mentioned.

The practice was certainly known in antiquity. A prescription for abortion can be found in an Egyptian papyrus dating back to the 16th century BCE. The only people in the ancient Near East who explicitly condemned it were the Assyrians, who were primarily known for their cruelty in war rather than for their humane concerns about the lives of the vulnerable.

Abortion was known, at least as a possibility, in Israel. The prophet Jeremiah curses the day he was born and the man who brought the news to his father, “because he did not kill me in the womb so my mother would have been my grave.”

Yet there is no law in the Bible forbidding the practice.

The text that served as the basis for later discussion in Jewish tradition is in Exodus, whose 21st chapter reads (in Hebrew): “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, but no other harm occurs,” there is a financial penalty.

3

The Greek translation of this verse is quite different, in line with Greek views about the beginning of life: “If two men fight and strike a pregnant woman and her child comes out not fully formed, he (the striker) will be forced to pay a penalty. But if it is fully formed, he shall give life for life.” A person who kills a “fully formed” baby is subject to the death penalty, as a murderer would be. If the baby was not fully formed, the penalty is financial, as was typical for property crimes.

This translation has been interpreted to mean that by implication, the permissibility of abortion, too, depends on whether the fetus is fully formed.

On the issue of when the fetus reaches this stage, opinions have fluctuated through the centuries. In later Jewish tradition, which is based on the Bible but tries to fill in the gaps where the Bible is not explicit, the issue is often whether the greater part of the head has emerged. If it has, abortion is no longer an option. In some cases, the baby has only been deemed a person when it is fully born. Modern medicine permits greater awareness of stages of development within the womb.

An accidental miscarriage, of course, is not the same thing as an intentional abortion. As far as abortion itself goes, the Jewish historian Josephus, writing at the end of the first century CE, claims that the Law of Moses — that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament — forbids abortion and regards it as infanticide, but there is no such law in the Bible.

More typical of Jewish tradition is the Mishnah (a collection of laws based on oral tradition, written down about 200 CE), which allows abortion in the case of hard, potentially life-threatening labor, since the life of the mother takes precedence over that of the child.

There is no discussion of abortion in the New Testament. The first explicit condemnations of abortion in Christian tradition appear in the second century CE in the Didache, a writing that claims to be based on the teachings of the apostles, and the Epistle of Barnabas, another early Christian work, modeled on the letters of Paul.

While the Bible does not forbid abortion, it does not permit it either. It simply says nothing about it. Perhaps it was not widely practiced. It was a dangerous procedure, not to be undertaken lightly. Children were generally regarded as a blessing and childlessness as an affliction.

But for whatever reason, the Bible provides no definitive ruling on the subject. It neither affirms a right to life for the fetus nor a woman’s right to choose.

Such putative rights have a place in modern discussion. Everyone in the modern world, regardless of religious commitment, is shaped by the legacy of the Enlightenment, which gave us the discourse of human rights. Christians can point to a long tradition of condemnation of abortion, dating back to the period just after the New Testament, and may reasonably feel that this tradition carries weight.

But there is no line to be drawn from Trump’s Bible display to a Supreme Court justice who may overturn Roe. v. Wade — or rather no line that is not heavily overdrawn by politics. But Christians who turn to Scripture to trump a political debate with the force of biblical authority should be reminded that the Bible does not actually say anything at all on the topic. On this issue, there is no divine revelation to be had.

(John J. Collins is Holmes Professor of Old Testament at Yale Divinity School and author of “What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

4 

What the Bible actually says about abortion may surprise you

Melanie A. Howard, Fresno Pacific University

Published: July 20, 2022 8.22am EDT

In the days since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had established the constitutional right to an abortion, some Christians have cited the Bible to argue why this decision should either be celebrated or lamented. But here’s the problem: This 2,000-year-old text says nothing about abortion.

As a university professor of biblical studies, I am familiar with faith-based arguments Christians use to back up views of abortion, whether for or against. Many people seem to assume the Bible discusses the topic head-on, which is not the case.

Ancient context

Abortions were known and practiced in biblical times, although the methods differed significantly from modern ones. The second-century Greek physician Soranus, for example, recommended fasting, bloodletting, vigorous jumping and carrying heavy loads as ways to end a pregnancy.

Soranus’ treatise on gynecology acknowledged different schools of thought on the topic. Some medical practitioners forbade the use of any abortive methods. Others permitted them, but not in cases in which they were intended to cover up an adulterous liaison or simply to preserve the mother’s good looks.

In other words, the Bible was written in a world in which abortion was practiced and viewed with nuance. Yet the Hebrew and Greek equivalents of the word “abortion” do not appear in either the Old or New Testament of the Bible. That is, the topic simply is not directly mentioned.

5

What the Bible says

The absence of an explicit reference to abortion, however, has not stopped its opponents or proponents from looking to the Bible for support of their positions.

Abortion opponents turn to several biblical texts that, taken together, seem to suggest that human life has value before birth. For example, the Bible opens by describing the creation of humans “in the image of God”: a way to explain the value of human life, presumably even before people are born. Likewise, the Bible describes several important figures, including the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah and the Christian Apostle Paul, as having being called to their sacred tasks since their time in the womb. Psalm 139 asserts that God “knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

However, abortion opponents are not the only ones who can appeal to the Bible for support. Supporters can point to other biblical texts that would seem to count as evidence in their favor.

Exodus 21, for example, suggests that a pregnant woman’s life is more valuable than the fetus’s. This text describes a scenario in which men who are fighting strike a pregnant woman and cause her to miscarry. A monetary fine is imposed if the woman suffers no other harm beyond the miscarriage. However, if the woman suffers additional harm, the perpetrator’s punishment is to suffer reciprocal harm, up to life for life.

6

There are other biblical texts that seem to celebrate the choices that women make for their bodies, even in contexts in which such choices would have been socially shunned. The fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, for example, describes a woman with a gynecological ailment that has made her bleed continuously taking a great risk: She reaches out to touch Jesus’ cloak in hopes that it will heal her, even though the touch of a menstruating woman was believed to cause ritual contamination. However, Jesus commends her choice and praises her faith.

Similarly, in the Gospel of John, Jesus’ follower Mary seemingly wastes resources by pouring an entire container of costly ointment on his feet and using her own hair to wipe them – but he defends her decision to break the social taboo around touching an unrelated man so intimately.

Beyond the Bible

In the response to the Supreme Court’s decision, Christians on both sides of the partisan divide have appealed to any number of texts to assert that their particular brand of politics is biblically backed. However, if they claim the Bible specifically condemns or approves of abortion, they are skewing the textual evidence to fit their position.

Of course, Christians can develop their own faith-based arguments about modern political issues, whether or not the Bible speaks directly to them. But it is important to recognize that although the Bible was written at a time when abortion was practiced, it never directly addresses the issue.

NBC News

                                                                                                                        7

 ABORTION IN THE BIBLE  (Focus on the Family)

BY KIRSTIE PIPER   SEPTEMBER 23, 2021 

Tragically, abortion and infanticide were common practices in Bible times. The reasons for each were surprisingly diverse.

Is abortion in the Bible? Where in the Bible does it say that abortion is wrong? — Knowing that the modern technologies of the abortion industry didn’t exist in Biblical times, these are fair questions. Yet, both abortion and infanticide were common practices in Bible times. And the reasons for each were surprisingly diverse. We can best understand abortion as it occurs in the Bible by understanding the culture and social issues of that time.

Does the Bible Mention Abortion?

Yes and no. Within scripture, abortion isn’t mentioned as the exact term “abortion.” However, understanding what an abortion involves helps shed light on abortion in the Bible.

The goal of an abortion is to end a pregnancy. For simplicity’s sake, let’s consider pregnancy as a vehicle. This vehicle always carries at least one passenger — a baby.

Clearly, we cannot stop the movement of a car without stopping its passengers. Similarly, we cannot end a pregnancy without ending the life of a baby.

With that in mind, does the Bible talk about the ending of infant lives? Yes. 

Abortion in the Bible's Time

The first abortion is said to have occurred in ancient Egypt. However, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians and Jews record using various methods of abortion. As revealed by archeologists, these methods included:

Abortifacients – Herbs that produce miscarriage.

Massage – Extreme pressure or physical trauma to the women’s midsection until abortion occurs.

Embryotomy – An incredibly invasive procedure much like the dismemberment abortion procedures of today.

Bible Time Culture and Abortion

Of course, antiquated views about preborn children varied from culture to culture. For instance, the Greeks and Romans practiced abortion under the faulty assumption that a preborn child is more plant-like than a human. In contrast, Persians viewed preborn children as equal individual human beings. For this reason, under Persian law, the mother, the father and the abortion provider could be punished for the crime of abortion.

8

Tragically, abortion and infanticide also occurred for substantially darker reasons. For example, certain groups intentionally practiced the taking of young lives. Often, it was done so to please specific pagan deities or rulers.

Infanticide as Religious Practice

God’s demand that his people not participate in the worship of other deities was not without warrant. As with several religions of the Bible days, infanticide aided in idol worship. Prominent deities worshiped in this way include:

Moloch/Molech/Baal

Tanit/Tannith/Tannit

Cronus/Cronos/Kronos

Saturn/Saturnus

In addition, several passages of scripture in the Old Testament refer to the Canaanites offering their children to various unnamed deities (Psalm 106:37-41).

Reasons for Abortion in the Bible

The rationality behind taking a child’s life varied from practice to practice. For instance, offering one’s child to a deity might assure prosperity. Likewise, a child with a disability might become an offering for an idol in exchange for a healthier child. Surprisingly, a few modern pro-abortion arguments were present in Bible times, as well.

Certainly, abortion cropped up throughout history as a “solution” to overpopulation, poverty, and untimely pregnancy. However, it’s important to remember that, in these cases, abortion was often used to oppress the weaker or lower class. A wealthy follower of Moloch might save their child from becoming a sacrifice by offering the child of a lower-class citizen. A Pharaoh or King might eliminate an entire generation in order to preserve his status.

"A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be comforted, because they are no more.”

9

Matthew 2:18

Does the Bible Say Abortion is Wrong?

Several books of the Bible are heavy with the mention of infanticide. Throughout the Old Testament, God commands His followers to reject worship via infanticide. Likewise, He insists his people destroy any symbols associated with deities that condone the practice. For example, God’s disgust and response to these practices appear throughout these books:

Leviticus 18 and 20

Deuteronomy 12 and 18

Jeremiah 7, 19 and 32

2 Kings 17, 21 and 23

Aside from idol worship, tyrannical rulers used abortion to secure their place in government. For instance, both Pharaoh and King Herod commanded the mass abortion of male children.

Exodus — Under Pharaoh’s command, sex-selective infanticide and abortion were used to control the Hebrew population in Exodus 1. Midwives were instructed to abort all newborn males “on the birthstool” in Exodus 1:16.

Matthew — In Matthew 2, King Herod hears that the “King of the Jews” has been born. In an attempt to secure his own rule, Herod demands the life of every male child 2-years-old and under (Matthew 2:16-18). Had an angel not warned Joseph to flee with his family, Jesus might have been among those put to death.

10

Abortion Today

Clearly, most of the world has long outgrown the gruesome practices involved in serving Moloch and Cronus. Despite this, well-meaning Christians might compare the old traditions of child sacrifice to the abortions of today.

Certainly, abortion harms children. However, just as in Bible times, it also harms women. We’d be doing the pro-life movement a disservice to believe that all abortion-vulnerable women of today are equal to the blood-thirsty zealots of the Old Testament. Perhaps, in sporadic cases, abortion is still celebrated for the lives it claims. Even so, often, the reasons for modern abortion are more complex.

Recent studies on why women seek abortions reveal this: 

46% of women want abortion for multiple reasons.

40% of women experience financial lack.

31% of women have partner-related concerns.

29% of women pursue abortion our of concern for the children they already have.

Undoubtedly, every life lost to abortion is just as tragic and unjust as those lost in the days of the Canaanites. However, many women facing today’s abortion decisions approach the topic with limited knowledge about the procedure. Likewise, the little information women receive comes wrapped in layers of deceptive political rhetoric. Furthermore, it’s embellished and marketed by a multi-million dollar industry. 

How to End Abortion

The takeaway from the history of abortion shouldn’t be that women are practicing savage worship practices of ancient times. Truthfully, many of the abortion-vulnerable women of today do not do so out of a desire for prosperity but as a perceived alternative to suffering.

Ending abortion may not be easy, but it is simple. We can see men, women and children live abundant lives by fighting the root causes of abortion. It’s by combatting confusion, fear, poverty, hopelessness and misinformation that we save lives!

11

When does life begin? What different religions say about abortion

Updated 6:43 pm EDT May. 3, 2022

When does life begin? That's the central disagreement fueling the half-century debate over abortion rights in the United States.

For many Americans, the answer is found in their faith. 

The problem is that three of the biggest religions in America disagree. Because Christian teachings state that life begins at conception, different denominations such as Catholicism and Southern Baptists oppose abortion. Meanwhile, Judaism and Islam prioritize the life of the mother and support abortion.

The back-and-forth over when life starts has never been more urgent with the release Monday night of a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggesting the high court is poised to overturn its landmark 1973. Roe v. Wade decision that gave pregnant people a constitutional right to abortion.

The Supreme Court is expected to release its official ruling on abortion rights this summer. 

For decades, the anti-abortion movement has been fueled by Christian leaders. 

Nearly twice as many evangelical Protestants (63%) oppose legal abortion compared to mainline Protestants (33%), according to the most recent survey of abortion views by faith performed by Pew Research Center. Three-quarter of Jehovah’s Witnesses and nearly as many Mormons (70%) say abortion should be illegal.

In contrast, 83% of American Jews and 55% of American Muslims say abortion should be legal. 

American Catholics are largely split, with 56% supportive of legal abortion and 42% opposed, a 2019 Pew Research Center survey found. 

Overall, about 49% of Americans said abortion should be "legal and accessible," according to a USA TODAY/Ipsos poll published in April.

12

Christianity says life begins at conception 

For many Christians, answers on abortion can be found in the Bible.

"God alone is the author of life and he alone numbers our days,"states Job 14:5-7. Psalms provides further guidance for many Christian religions, defining life as: "From the moment of conception to natural death" and "You knit me in my mother's womb."

But until the 1970s, opposition to abortion was foremost a Catholic issue. According to Catholic Church doctrine, it is a grave sin that could result in excommunication.

Pope Francis has said because abortion is akin to murder, the Catholic Church cannot accept it. "Without beating about the bush, if you have an abortion, you kill," he said in 2021 when asked whether President Joe Biden, who is Catholic and supports abortion rights, should be denied Communion. 

Francis added: "You take any embryology book that medical school students study, at the third week of conception, many times before the mother knows she is pregnant, there are already all the organs, all, even the DNA. Isn’t that a person? It is a human life, and this human life must be respected." 

While the Catholic Church's stance on abortion has not wavered, in recent years, Pope Francis has said priests could grant forgiveness to people who have had abortions. Prior to 2016, priests had to consult with bishops on a case-by-case basis to do so.

13

For American protestants, opinions about abortion have changed throughout the past five decades.

Christian traditions such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church and Presbyterians have said it is difficult to determine when human life begins.

As such, they tend to support legal access to abortion, leaving the decision to each person.

The Southern Baptist Convention — the largest Protestant denomination — passed resolutions dating back to the 1970s supporting the idea that abortion access should be allowed under certain conditions, including damage to the emotional, mental and physical health of a mother, and that the government should play a limited role. 

This "reflected a middle ground between the extreme of abortion on demand and the opposite extreme of all abortion as murder," a later resolution dated June 1, 1974, stated. "That resolution dealt responsibly from a Christian perspective with complexities of abortion problems in contemporary society."

Evangelicals' opposition to abortion began in 1978, according to Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Balmer's research has found that after the 1960s civil rights era, white evangelicals comprising the "religious right" that had defended segregation needed a new issue to galvanize their political base and the Republican party.

"They had finally landed on a 'respectable' issue, opposition to abortion, that would energize white evangelicals — and, not incidentally, divert attention from the real origins of their movement," he wrote.

Historians trace many fetal personhood bills that gained steam in Republican-controlled legislatures back to this moment in history.

14

Since 2018, bills restricting abortion from the point that a heartbeat can be detected, or after roughly six weeks, have been signed into law in Ohio, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Alabama, Kentucky, South Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma. 

Each time, conservative politicians have emphasized they are protecting life, which they say begins at the moment of fertilization.

“I promised Oklahomans that I would sign every pro-life bill that hit my desk,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said in April when signing a bill into law making it a felony to perform an abortion. “And that's what we're doing."

Judaism and Islam believe in protecting life of the mother

For many Jewish leaders, Christian biblical interpretations of when life begins are problematic.

In part, this is because Christians often cite Psalms as proof. Whereas in Judaism, Psalms is a book of poetry.

Jewish laws are derived from the first five books of the Hebrew Bible; Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. According to Genesis 2:7, life begins at the first breath, when "God breathed breath into him." As such, terminating a pregnancy is not a crime because fetuses do not have souls.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, a scholar in residence at the National Council of Jewish Women in Evanston, Illinois, said this is further explained in a passage in Exodus 21:22-23, which reads: “When men fight, and one of them pushes a pregnant woman and a miscarriage results, but no other harm ensues, the one responsible shall be fined when the woman’s husband demands compensation... But if other harm ensues, the penalty shall be life for life.”

Ruttenberg said this makes clear the life of the mother takes precedent over the fetus. And that in Judaism, abortion is not only permitted but taking all necessary measures to save a pregnant person's life is required.

"Laws banning abortion access violate Jewish religious freedom," she said. 

15

Recently, Torat Chayim, a rabbinical association of about 300 Orthodox rabbis, issued statements strongly condemning anti-abortion bans in Texas and Oklahoma.

"Under this bill, Oklahoman Jews are not able to protect a mother’s life in accordance with the ancient laws of our faith," the statement said. 

In the Muslim faith, life begins at conception, but abortion is permitted for up to 120 days, including in cases of rape. 

Muslim views on abortion are shaped by the Hadith, the recorded beliefs of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, which says that after the first four months, the fetus is "ensouled." 

According to Abdulrahman Al-Matary, a neonatology professor at the King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Islam's views on abortion take into account the threat of harm posed to mothers, the presence of abnormalities and the status of the pregnancy "before or after the ensoulment."

After this period, abortion is forbidden, he said.

BUZZFEED 2/2/2025  Note:

12. In the 1840s, doctors didn’t wash their hands between autopsies and childbirth, leading to a high infant mortality rate.  Did they in Biblical times?

16

Jews, outraged by restrictive abortion laws, are invoking the Hebrew Bible in the debate

Lindsay Schnell

USA TODAY. July 24, 2019

When Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, a Republican, signed into law in May one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans, she invoked her faith. 

“To the bill’s many supporters, this legislation stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God,” Ivey said in a statement. 

This is a familiar argument for the Republican Party when it comes to abortion access. In January, Kirk Cox, speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, cited biblical scripture when he came out against a proposed bill that would lift late-term abortion restrictions. 

"You knit me together in my mother’s womb,” he said, quoting Psalm 139. “You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born.” 

But for many leaders in the Jewish faith, such interpretations are problematic and even insulting.

“It makes me apoplectic,” says Danya Ruttenberg, a Chicago-based rabbi who has written about Jews' interpretation of abortion. “Most of the proof texts that they’re bringing in for this are ridiculous. They’re using my sacred text to justify taking away my rights in a way that is just so calculated and craven.”

Across the country, as a wave of anti-abortion legislation reinvigorates the fight over reproductive rights, Jewish religious leaders, activists and women are speaking out in favor of a woman's right to choose, buoyed by their faith.

It’s not just that the U.S. shouldn’t be deriving law from poetic language, Ruttenberg said. It’s that the Jewish tradition has a distinctly different reading of the same texts. While conservative Christians use the Bible to argue that a fetus represents a human life, which makes abortion murder, Jews don’t believe that fetuses have souls and, therefore, terminating a pregnancy is no crime.

While some Orthodox rabbis have denounced abortion, within Jewish communities there’s considerable support for keeping it legal. Studies from the Pew Research Center show that Jews overwhelmingly (83%) support abortion rights. The National Council of Jewish Women, a 126-year-old organization that helped establish some of the first birth control clinics across the country, considers reproductive rights a cornerstone issue and has publicly condemned the strict abortion bans recently handed down in Alabama and Mississippi. 

17

What to know about abortion laws:

Republicans have been pushing for decades to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that recognized a woman's right to an abortion. Now, with two Supreme Court appointments from President Donald Trump giving the court a conservative bent, the law seems more at risk than ever before. Restrictive laws are being passed all over the South, and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion legislation, 30 states now "demonstrate hostility toward abortion rights" while 14 demonstrate support.

It’s common in this debate to hear the Christian perspective. But what’s often left out of the conversation is how Jews, who read the Hebrew Bible – referred to in Christian circles as the Old Testament – argue that their tradition condones abortion. Sometimes, if the mother's life is at stake, it even insists on it. 

This is a big deal for us,” Ruttenberg says. “We’re very clear about a woman’s right to choose. And we’re very clear about the separation between church and state.” 

What Jewish lawmakers say about abortion rights

U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., likes to joke that she took tikkun olam so seriously, she wound up in politics.

Within the Jewish tradition, tikkun olam – Hebrew for “repair the world” – is a sort of call to action, a concept defined by acts of kindness and service that help heal the world. Wasserman Schultz, the first Jewish woman to represent Florida in Congress, says her faith informs her politics every day. 

“I have always served and looked at policy through a distinctly Jewish lens,” Wasserman Schultz says. “And so for me, when I’m thinking about a woman’s right to make her own reproductive choices, the Jewish tradition that I’ve always been taught holds that existing life should take precedence over potential life, and a woman’s life and her pain should take precedence over a fetus.” 

18

Abortion poll: Most Americans oppose 'fetal heartbeat' laws, closing of all clinics in a state

The strongest argument in the Hebrew Bible for permitting abortion comes from Exodus, Chapter 21, Verse 22-23: “If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows. But if there is serious injury, you are to take a life for a life.” 

In this passage, "gives birth prematurely" could mean the woman miscarries, and the fetus dies. Because there's no expectation that the person who caused the miscarriage is liable for murder, Jewish scholars argue this proves a fetus is not considered a separate person or soul. 

The Talmud, a two-part Jewish text comprised of centuries worth of thought, debate and discussion, is also helpful when discussing abortion. The Talmud explains that for the first 40 days of a woman’s pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere fluid” and considered part of the mother until birth. The baby is considered a nefesh – Hebrew for “soul” or “spirit” – once its head has emerged, and not before. 

Jewish tradition and scholars have also acknowledged a pregnant woman’s potential “great need” to terminate a pregnancy. 

Rabbi Elizer Waldenberg, a leading authority on Jewish law who died in 2006, wrote in Tzitz Eliezer, his major text, that "it is clear that in Jewish law an Israelite is not liable to capital punishment for feticide. ... An Israelite woman was permitted to undergo a therapeutic abortion, even though her life was not at stake. ... This permissive ruling applies even when there is no direct threat to the life of the mother, but merely a need to save her from great pain, which falls within the rubric of ‘great need.’”

“There’s a lot of ambiguity about what that need means,” Ruttenberg says. “A psychological need is considered real.” 

Wasserman Schultz references pikuach nefesh, the principle in Jewish law that the preservation of a human life overrides nearly all other religious considerations, which also allows a woman to seek an abortion, especially if her own life is in danger. 

19

“You can use that same principle to show that women, more than anyone else, understand their bodies and what medical decisions are right for them,” Wasserman Schultz says.

For Wasserman Schultz, abortion access should be unrestricted, regardless of faith. “I’m not going to tell you that you’re interpreting Scripture incorrectly,” she says. “But don’t prescribe rules for me and my decisions based on your interpretation of your scripture.”  

Retired U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer was one of the most prominent Jewish lawmakers in the country while she represented California for 24 years. There’s no doubt, Boxer says, that faith informs each person's views on a variety of subjects. But that’s exactly what they are – personal views, not something for everyone else to comment, or legislate, on.

“If you respect religion, then you should be pro-choice,” Boxer says. “We can’t always agree 100% with each other, but we can respect each other … and I feel I am respecting religion by saying I would fight for your rights regardless of what you believe.” 

Religious freedom concerns

To Rabbi Michael Adam Latz of Minneapolis, the fight over abortion rights – and lawmakers who reference their faith as a reason for why certain laws should exist – is a larger issue. That shouldn’t just worry Jews, whose tradition teaches something other than Evangelical Christianity, he says. It should worry anyone who believes in religious freedom. 

“While I certainly understand that there are people who disagree with me, in a nation for which religious pluralism is a hallmark, to impose one religious tradition on this is not actually how a democracy functions, it’s how a theocracy functions,” Latz says. 

Every person of conscious, he says, regardless of their personal views on abortion, should be deeply concerned. 

That sentiment is echoed by Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women. Katz has been in her role only since June, but she says she was struck in her first few days on the job by the number of volunteers and activists she saw in the streets engaging in the debate over abortion rights. It makes her angry, she says, when men try to govern women’s bodies. As a member of a religious minority, she’s particularly wary of one dominant religion trying to govern based on its faith texts. 

20

“As Jews, we know that true religious freedom is a shield to protect all religions and never a sword to discriminate,” she said. “It often feels like religion is used to discriminate – and that is not something we stand for, regardless of the issue.” 

Latz has spent time speaking on women’s rights both from the pulpit and in smaller conversations with his congregation. He says his directness can catch some people off guard. But a rabbi’s job is to teach the Torah, he says, and the Torah itself is “inherently political." 

“It’s important to recognize that this is not a new fight,” Latz says. “This is just the latest chapter. Our tradition teaches that women don’t have abortions they want – they have abortions they need.” 

Abortion felt like only option 

For at least one Jewish activist, that rings especially true. She didn't necessarily want an abortion – she felt she had no other choice. 

It was 1967, and Nancy Litz didn’t want to be pregnant. 

Six years before the Roe vs. Wade ruling would guarantee a woman’s right to a safe and legal abortion, Litz, then a freshman in college, believed terminating her pregnancy was a necessity. Her father had recently died, and her mother, who had dreamed of going away to college herself, was at what Litz described as “a horribly traumatic point in her own life.” She never considered what she did destroying a human life. 

“I don’t believe that clump of cells, while it was potential life, was actual life,” Litz says. “And it certainly wasn’t more important to me than the lives of the people I already knew and loved.” 

Through a friend, Litz connected with a doctor, a man she says told her he was compelled to perform the illegal procedure because he had daughters of his own who were college age and he wouldn’t want them opting for a dangerous, back-alley operation in hopes of extracting themselves from a desperate situation. 

21

Fifty-two years later, Litz, 71, lives in St. Louis and owns a small business.  Her abortion story isn’t gruesome, and there were no lingering consequences. Litz, who has two grown daughters, is now an activist and volunteer with the National Council of Jewish Women and shares her story whenever she can. She’s disturbed by both the potential of Roe being overturned, and the way other faith leaders frame the conversation around abortion. 

“The right word is shame,” Litz said. “What I heard were women telling stories about having an abortion and the suffering with giant regrets and self-condemnation, and I couldn’t help but thinking, I couldn’t help but wondering – how much of that was genuinely the feelings that they had about the procedure, and how much of it was layered onto them by messages from specific faith traditions telling them that what they had done was terrible?” 

Litz came to Judaism later in life. Raised Protestant, she wasn’t practicing by the time she went off to college. Even if she had been active in the church at the time she got pregnant, she can’t imagine she ever would have consulted a minister – in the '60s, abortion wasn’t something you talked about openly. She recalls a couple of girls in her high school disappearing for a stretch, then magically showing up again, presumably after they’d given birth. The media, she remembers, was consumed for a time with a woman who traveled all the way to Japan to access abortion services. But even then, discussions stayed quiet. 

Ending Roe v. Wade wouldn't end abortion in America. This is what happens next

She wonders, too, if people really understand the risk women will be under if Roe is overturned. Like many activists, Litz is adamant that criminalizing abortion won’t stop it – it’ll just make it deadly. Women will continue to terminate pregnancies and put their lives in danger in the process. Years after her abortion, Litz got emotional when she read that in 1967, 42% of the nation’s maternal death rate was attributed to botched abortion. She’s terrified of those numbers resurfacing. 

22

Litz says she’s often praised privately by other women who have had abortions, women who comment on her bravery and honesty, admitting they could never share publicly the way she does. 

“It just doesn’t make sense,” she says. “Why can’t we, as people of faith who have different specific beliefs about the significance of terminating a pregnancy, be equally free to express our truth? 

“It’s distressing to me that extreme right wing conservatives, that specific segment of Christianity, has co-opted this entire discussion. ... They present themselves as speaking for all people of faith when that is really not the case.” 

23

Think Christianity Is Anti-Abortion? Think Again

Among God’s faithful, a unified and triumphant cry rises up from the land. As the godly take their place in the pews, Bibles in hand, hearts in throats, there is bountiful rejoicing. Roe_ is defeated. Goodness has prevailed. The people of God have won for Him a great victory._

That narrative largely aligns with what Americans have been led to believe. It also happens to be false, the product of an effort by conservative white evangelicals to convince us all that an anti-abortion stance is synonymous with godliness, that Christians are united in their opposition to this sinful scourge on the nation.

The reality is that for as long as it has been a wedge issue in America, there has been a compelling Christian argument for abortion care, and Christian leaders who have worked to both advocate for it and help secure it for women inside and outside the flock. In 1967, more than five years before Roe, a group of pastors founded the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion, a network of Christian-faith leaders committed to helping women get both legal and illegal abortions from licensed professionals. By the time Roe passed, as many as half a million women had obtained a safe abortion thanks to the CCS, whose members claimed to be compelled by “higher laws and moral obligations transcending legal codes.” They used the Bible’s authority to argue for abortion care as not just a basic human right but a moral Christian imperative.

Then, of course, Roe was decided, eventually galvanizing an anti-abortion minority that had been building its own grassroots coalition for the past few decades and that could be drawn into the GOP on this issue alone. With the law on their side — and their hackles raised by the unsavory and baldly political tactics of their more conservative brethren — many pro-abortion-rights Protestants retreated. “As I was coming along in ministry they taught me not to be explicitly ‘Christian’ when I spoke out in the public square, because they didn’t want to, quote, ‘be like the Christian Right,’” says the Rev. Jennifer Butler, founder of Faith in Public Life. “They were embarrassed the Christian Right used their voice in the way that it did.”

24

What resulted was that more mainline Protestantism seemed to recuse itself from the abortion conversation, ceding the appearance of moral authority to the conservative minority. Yet according to a Pew survey published this past May, a majority of not just religious people but of Christians, specifically, support a woman’s right to abortion care in some, if not all, cases. Twenty percent of Black Protestants say abortion should be legal without exception; a full 77 percent of white evangelicals think it should be legal at least sometimes. Fifty-nine percent of Christians in the United States did not want Roe overturned. And as evidence for the notion that some people who malign the abortions of others may be far more lenient when facing the prospect of their own unwanted pregnancy, a 2014 Relationships in America survey found that while conservative women were much more likely to oppose abortion, they were only slightly less likely to have had one.

In fact, for many Christians, and especially in the lead-up to Friday’s landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, speaking up in support of abortion access has become increasingly important — not in spite of their faith, but because of it. “It’s not just that many Christians aren’t out celebrating today; it’s that many Christians across the country are out protesting,” says Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, author of Just Faith: Reclaiming Progressive Christianity, who spoke to me on Friday after returning from a protest in front of the Supreme Court, where he’d been joined by other faith leaders. “There’s a consistent outrage from Christians about the decision, in addition to the much more widely-known and talked about praise for the decision. People have fought for reproductive justice because of their Christian faith throughout history, and that will continue now.”

25

And it will continue because for many Christians, fighting for bodily autonomy is actually biblical, an extension of the belief that we are made in the image of God, that our bodies are holy, and that the government should not intervene in that holiness. It’s biblical because it grants people the free will that God has endowed them with, because it supports the sanctity and dignity of life across the spectrum and the call to live life abundantly. And, crucially, it’s biblical because reproductive justice aligns with the teachings of Jesus. “I see Jesus as one who continually meets folks who are at the margins of society and listens to them and amplifies their voices and welcomes them where they have not received welcome in a really long time, if ever,” says the Rev. Lauren Jones Mayfield, the chairperson of Planned Parenthood’s national Clergy Advocacy Board. “When we are on the side of the marginalized, I think that we are with the patients who are walking into the health centers rather than protesting on the sidewalks outside of them.”

What’s more, abortion access is biblical because it’s actually in the bible. While Jesus never mentions abortion or opines on when life begins, other parts of the bible do, equating life with breath and even offering instructions on how to perform the procedure. For those who would use other verses — and there are always other verses — to equate abortion with murder or argue that bodily autonomy also pertains to an embryo or fetus, pro-abortion Christians counsel against the far right’s certitude of its own righteousness in this matter. The frequent conservative rejoinder “thou shalt not kill” is improperly applied here, says the Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, a senior minister at Collegiate Church, the oldest continuous Protestant church in America. As she points out, the Old Testament, which includes that commandment, also includes plenty of other laws that baldly conflict with it and that have been the subject of earnest Jewish debate throughout the centuries. “‘If the far-right Christian-ish people want to debate ‘thou shalt not kill,’ get a rabbi, not your far-right pastor, but a rabbi to come talk to your church and speak about what those texts mean and what Jewish people think about abortions,” she says. “That same Jewish code, those same Jewish laws, also had provisions for when you must have an abortion.”

26

Which is why, for many pro-abortion Christians, access to abortion care is actually a matter of — wait for it — religious liberty. It’s about allowing not only for the religious difference of people of other faiths or no faith at all, but also allowing for other interpretations of Christianity. “Really, they’re trampling on my religious liberty when they enforce their way of looking at things on me legislatively,” says Butler. “That’s not the purpose of religious liberty. It’s to grant people the freedom to make moral decisions,” even — or perhaps especially — if those decisions arrive at different outcomes. For Butler and others, allowing a religious minority to dictate public policy leads to exactly the sort of coercion and force the founders were attempting to escape and that Jesus frequently denounced. Making way for other interpretations should be a foundational principle not just of democracy but also of faith — otherwise, it isn’t faith at all; it’s just stale indoctrination.

People of color have been fighting that stale indoctrination for years, fortifying a faith that respects women’s bodily autonomy. “There are communities and churches of color that have been connected to this work from the beginning,” says Mayfield, whose home state of Kentucky was one of three that had a trigger law in effect banning abortion immediately the moment Roe was overturned. “The white, progressive church is coming to this conversation a little bit late, but at least we’re here for the conversation now, and we do well to follow the movement of people of color and pastors of color who have been trying to galvanize on the issue of abortion since the religious right started to take over.”

For many pro-abortion Christians, the issue boils down to an authentic pursuit of the life of Christ, one that they see as meeting people where they are and trusting them to make decisions faithfully. “I think Jesus would be like, ‘What are you doing? What are you doing in my name? Why are you oppressing the women in my name?’” says Lewis. “Listen to the guy who was an outsider, who was a homeless person, who was a refugee, who was poor, who God chose — let’s just be honest — to come in that marginal place to heal the world.” She pauses, letting that thought resonate. “What would Jesus do? What would he do, really?”

27 

The Religious Right and the Abortion Myth

White evangelicals in the 1970s didn’t initially care about abortion. They organized to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions — and only seized on banning abortion because it was more palatable than their real goal.

Randall Balmer, the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College, is the author of Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right.

On the face of it, Samuel Alito’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, published by POLITICO last week, represents a vindication for the Religious Right, the culmination of nearly five decades of working to outlaw abortion. “I don’t know if this report is true,” said evangelist Franklin Graham of the draft opinion overturning abortion rights, “but if it is, it is an answer to many years of prayer.”

The history of that movement, however, is more complicated. White evangelicals in the 1970s did not mobilize against Roe v. Wade, which they considered a Catholic issue. They organized instead to defend racial segregation in evangelical institutions, including Bob Jones University.

To suggest otherwise is to perpetrate what I call the abortion myth, the fiction that the genesis of the Religious Right — the powerful evangelical political movement that has reshaped American politics over the past four decades — lay in opposition to abortion.

The historical record is clear. In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, organized a conference with the Christian Medical Society to discuss the morality of abortion. The gathering attracted 26 heavyweight theologians from throughout the evangelical world, who debated the matter over several days and then issued a statement acknowledging the ambiguities surrounding the issue, which, they said, allowed for many different approaches.

28

“Whether the performance of an induced abortion is sinful we are not agreed,” the statement read, “but about the necessity of it and permissibility for it under certain circumstances we are in accord.”

Two successive editors of Christianity Today took equivocal stands on abortion. Carl F. H. Henry, the magazine’s founder, affirmed that “a woman’s body is not the domain and property of others,” and his successor, Harold Lindsell, allowed that, “if there are compelling psychiatric reasons from a Christian point of view, mercy and prudence may favor a therapeutic abortion.”

Meeting in St. Louis in 1971, the messengers (delegates) to the Southern Baptist Convention, hardly a redoubt of liberalism, passed a resolution calling for the legalization of abortion, a position they reaffirmed in 1974 — a year after Roe — and again in 1976.

When the Roe decision was handed down, W. A. Criswell, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and sometime president of the Southern Baptist Convention, issued a statement praising the ruling. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”

When Francis Schaeffer, the intellectual godfather of the Religious Right, tried to enlist Billy Graham in his antiabortion crusade in the late 1970s, Graham, the most famous evangelical of the 20th century, turned him down. Even James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family who later became an implacable foe of abortion, acknowledged in 1973 that the Bible was silent on the matter and therefore it was plausible for an evangelical to believe that “a developing embryo or fetus was not regarded as a full human being.”

29

Despite this history, the abortion myth persists, stoked repeatedly by the leaders of the Religious Right. If abortion was not the catalyst for this political movement of white evangelicals, however, what was?

According to Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and architect of the Religious Right, the movement started in the 1970s in response to attempts on the part of the Internal Revenue Service to rescind the tax-exempt status of whites-only segregation academies (many of them church sponsored) and Bob Jones University because of its segregationist policies. Among those affected was Jerry Falwell, who referred to the civil rights movement as “civil wrongs” and who had opened his own segregation academy in 1967. The IRS actions against racially segregated institutions, not abortion, is what mobilized evangelical activists in the 1970s, and they directed their ire against a fellow evangelical, Jimmy Carter, in the run-up to the 1980 presidential election.

Weyrich’s genius, however, lay in his understanding that racism — the defense of racial segregation — was not likely to energize grassroots evangelical voters. So he, Falwell and others deftly flipped the script. Instead of the Religious Right mobilizing in defense of segregation, evangelical leaders in the late 1970s decried government intrusion into their affairs as an assault on religious freedom, thereby writing a page for the modern Republican Party playbook, used shamelessly in the Hobby Lobby and the Masterpiece Cakeshop cases.

Weyrich’s savvy sleight-of-hand conveniently failed to acknowledge that tax exemption is a form of public subsidy and that, pursuant to the Brown decision of 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Green v. Connally ruling of 1971, the government has every right to stipulate that tax-exempt public institutions not engage in racial exclusion.

In any case, “religious freedom” didn’t prove to be the energizing issue that the leaders of the movement hoped, which is how abortion became part of the Religious Right agenda.

Because evangelicals had considered abortion a Catholic issue until the late 1970s, they expressed little interest in the matter; Falwell, by his own admission, did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until February 26, 1978, more than five years after Roe. During the midterm elections of 1978, however, antiabortion activists — Roman Catholics — leafleted church parking lots in four Senate races during the final weekend of the campaign: New Hampshire, Iowa and two races in Minnesota, one for the unexpired term of Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president. Two days later, in an election with a very low turnout, anti-abortion Republicans defeated the favored Democratic candidates.

30

I recall reading through Weyrich’s papers at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, and when I came across his correspondence following the 1978 midterm elections, the papers almost began to sizzle with excitement. He characterized the outcome as “true cause for celebration.” Weyrich had finally landed on an issue — abortion — that could mobilize grassroots evangelicals. Now, Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right had a “respectable” issue, opposition to abortion, one that would energize white evangelicals — and, not incidentally, divert attention from the real origins of their movement.

Even so, as late as August 22, 1980, when Ronald Reagan addressed more than ten thousand cheering evangelicals at Reunion Arena in Dallas, he talked about creationism, he said that if he were stranded on a desert island he would want the Bible, and he lambasted “Jimmy Carter’s Internal Revenue Service” for challenging the tax exemption of racially segregated evangelical institutions. On that occasion, however, Reagan said nothing whatsoever about abortion.

Abortion did not take hold among evangelicals until the eve of the 1980 presidential election, the result of assiduous promotion by Weyrich, Falwell and other leaders of the Religious Right following the 1978 midterms. In addition, although it was poorly received when it toured the country early in 1979, Frank Schaeffer’s anti-abortion film series Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which featured his father, Francis A. Schaeffer, and C. Everett Koop, began finally to take root among evangelicals.

Opposition to abortion, therefore, was a godsend for leaders of the Religious Right because it allowed them to distract attention from the real genesis of their movement: defense of racial segregation in evangelical institutions. With a cunning diversion, they were able to conjure righteous fury against legalized abortion and thereby lend a veneer of respectability to their political activism.

Alito’s draft makes no mention of this tawdry history.

31

Champion of the unborn

The unborn are a convenient group of people to advocate for.  They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without

substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without reimagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike

people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn."

Pastor Dave Barnhart / Birmingham, Alabama

32 

How the Romans "reversed circumcision" and 5 other shocking medical realities from the ancient empire

From brutal surgeries to questionable beauty procedures, Roman medicine was both advanced and terrifying.

The ancient Romans were pioneers in many aspects of medicine, but their treatments and surgeries were often painful, gruesome, and dangerous by modern standards. Without formal medical regulations, Roman doctors relied on brutal efficiency, risky procedures, and – sometimes – outright guesswork.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Dr Patty Baker reveals some of the most shocking medical practices of the Roman era: from "reversing" circumcision to performing amputations without anaesthesia.

How the Romans “reversed” circumcision

While circumcision was common in many ancient cultures, the Romans considered it undesirable. In certain parts of the Empire, men who had been circumcised – particularly those from Jewish or Eastern backgrounds – sometimes sought to “reverse” the procedure to blend in better with Roman society.

However, circumcision is a permanent procedure. So what form did this reversal take? Dr Baker explains, “The idea is if you want to go to the Roman baths and look more like a Roman, you make [an] incision in the skin above the head of the penis, and then hang weights on that skin.”

By adding the weights to stretch the skin, Dr Baker says, “eventually it should lengthen out” – effectively reversing the effect of the initial circumcision procedure.

This would have been an extremely painful and slow process, but evidently the chance to conform to Roman standards was worth the agony.

33

Roman surgeons performed “embryotomy”

Childbirth in the ancient world was extremely dangerous – and Rome was no exception.

As Dr Baker explains, in some tragic cases, a baby could die during labour but remain trapped in the birth canal. With no other option, Roman surgeons practiced a so-called “embryotomy”.

This was a horrific procedure that was deployed in an attempt to save a mother’s life, and to remove the baby from her body. However, it was incredibly harrowing and distressing: “Sometimes they have to use hooks and break [the foetus] up. And the whole point is you save the mother's life. Unfortunately, it is very gruesome.”

While obviously shocking from the lens of modern medicine, for Roman women, this was one of the few life-saving surgeries available in a time when maternal mortality was extremely high.

Surgeries were performed without anaesthesia

To make matters worse, this, and other surgeries, were performed without anaesthesia.

Romans knew how to remove infected or injured limbs, but with no painkillers beyond basic herbal remedies, the patient remained fully conscious during an operation.

However, attempts were still made to reduce the pain and terror that surgery would induce. Dr Baker says “There is a little discussion that there are some opium medicines that people might have been able to take, but usually it's wine or try to relax.”

In reality though, the only way to reduce suffering was for practitioners to work quickly, making surgeries a race against time as the patient endured unimaginable pain.

Doctors had to ignore a patient’s screams to do their job

Surgeons had to balance speed – trying the finish the procedures as quickly as possible – with precision, all while not getting distracted by the agonised screams of the patient in the absence of anaesthetics.

“The writer Celsus says that a really good surgeon is someone who will work fast enough to try to relieve the pain of the patient, but slow enough that the screams of the patient won't bother them so that they’ll do a good job,” says Dr Baker.

This was an incredibly hard balance to strike, and a good Roman surgeon wasn’t just skilled with a scalpel, they also needed the mental focus and clarity to block out the cries of their patients and keep operating.

34

Anyone could call themselves a doctor

“Anybody could say they were a doctor,” says Dr Baker.

Unlike today, there were no medical licenses or regulatory bodies in ancient Rome. This meant that anyone could claim to be a doctor, regardless of skill or training.

And, if a procedure went wrong, a bad doctor could simply disappear, moving away before anyone could hold them accountable. Dr Baker illustrates this, saying, “If something didn't go too well, they could sneak off in the middle of the night and who would know?”

This "Wild West" approach to medicine meant that while some physicians were skilled and knowledgeable, others were nothing more than dangerous frauds.

Romans had a vague idea of germs

The Romans were obsessed with cleanliness and built sophisticated public baths, aqueducts and sanitation systems. However, they didn’t fully grasp the concept of germs or how they caused infections.

“They do have an explanation for contagion,” says Dr Baker. “And they were aware that you did have to keep a wound area clean. They do talk about cleaning it. They say to use honey and sometimes wine or vinegar, which are antiseptic… they definitely recommend that and just keeping things clean.”

That said, in the absence of understanding what germs were, the spread of disease was instead pinned on ‘miasma’.

“In terms of contagion, what's very interesting is they talked about one way to get disease [which] was you could get a bad disease through a bad smell and they called it a miasma.”

In short, the Romans were on the right track with the knowledge available to them at the time. And, Dr Baker says, in general Roman medicine was restricted by the limitations of the time, but was “much more advanced than I think people give it credit for.”

The New Yorker

35

DOES A FETUS HAVE 

CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS?

After Dobbs, fetal personhood has become the anti-abortion movement’s new objective.

By Margaret Talbot

April 14, 2025

In the first two years after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, the number of abortions performed annually in the United States went up. On the face of it, this might seem perplexing. After all, many states seized the opportunity presented by the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to enact daunting new restrictions on abortion: twelve adopted near-total bans, and four more imposed gestational limits of six weeks, a point at which many people may not yet realize they are pregnant. Yet, suddenly, the U.S. was seeing an increase in abortions—from about nine hundred and thirty thousand in 2020 to more than a million in 2023. The best explanation for this apparent paradox was that providers and activists in states where abortion was still accessible devoted considerable energy and resources into making it more so. This was especially true for medication abortions provided via telehealth. In December, 2021, the F.D.A. had lifted its requirement that mifepristone be prescribed in person; the number of virtual clinics, which assess a patient’s eligibility online or by phone, and mail out the medications, proliferated.

The post-Dobbs restrictions plainly had an effect. Some states reported that they had reduced the number of abortions to virtually zero, and they made already hard circumstances harder for patients who have to travel from, say, Texas or Kentucky to North Carolina or Illinois, in many cases pushing abortions later into desperately unwanted pregnancies. Draconian new laws compounded the risks to patients carrying pregnancies that threatened their lives or health. And the over-all number of abortions in the U.S. may eventually decrease as a result of Dobbs. (The latest annual statistics available are from 2023.) Still, it seems safe to say that an immediate rise in the number of abortions was not what activists were looking for when they campaigned to overturn Roe v. Wade.

36

Given that abortion has not even come close to going away, it makes sense that the anti-abortion movement hasn’t, either. Dobbs was the first-round bell in a much bigger fight, for which the movement is in some ways more pumped up than ever. Donald Trump’s return to the White House is certainly invigorating. It’s true that, in his most recent campaign, Trump was canny on the subject of abortion, reminding his evangelical supporters that it was his Supreme Court appointments who had given them Dobbs, while stressing, for the benefit of the majority of Americans who disapprove of the ruling, that abortion policy was now up to the states. Amid the chaotic pileup of executive orders and agency demolitions in the first months of Trump 2.0, abortion politics has not loomed especially large. Trump has not yet, for instance, instructed the Department of Justice, per Project 2025, to ban the mailing of abortion pills by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act. Still, he hasn’t exactly neglected the issue: among other things, he pardoned twenty-three people who had been arrested for blockading abortion clinics, while directing the Department of Justice to minimize the enforcement of a 1994 law prohibiting violent or intimidating clinic protests. And, of course, these are early days.

But overturning Roe was never the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion movement, as Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California at Davis, argues in her cogent book “Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction.” Rather, she observes, it has “always been a fetal-personhood movement,” premised on the idea that the fetus is a “separate, unique human individual from the moment of fertilization,” and that because of this status “the Constitution gives (or at least should give) that individual rights.” Movement leaders have disagreed on how best to enforce fetal personhood—through a constitutional amendment or a federal statute that would ban abortion nationwide, for instance, or through the courts. They have differed, too, on how forcefully to push a proposition with some deeply unpopular possible ramifications: the limiting or outlawing of I.V.F. and some forms of contraception, say, or homicide prosecutions for women who choose to terminate their pregnancies. Many in the movement have opted for more incremental, and less punitive, strategies—suggesting, for instance, that women are innocent victims of abortion providers, and scarcely understand what it means to terminate a pregnancy. This was the reasoning behind so-called informed-consent laws, which compel  people seeking abortions to undergo ultrasounds, so they might view the fetus, or to be presented with (often misleading) information about the physical and psychological risks of the procedure.

37

Yet the goal of recognizing fetal personhood, Ziegler writes, has, for more than half a century, been a “singular point of agreement in a fractious movement.” Ziegler uses the term “fetal personhood,” but “embryonic personhood” might be more accurate: for many in the anti-abortion movement, a fertilized egg, and certainly a cluster of four or eight or sixteen cells, is already a human being, and therefore, within U.S. jurisdiction, is entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. (Strange in this context to contemplate how many of those rights-bearing fertilized eggs—as many as forty per cent—fail, through natural causes, even to implant in the uterine lining.)

It has long been a problem for both sides of the abortion debate that the Constitution does not mention the subject. Justice Harry Blackmun, in his majority opinion in Roe, attempted to solve that conundrum by expounding an unenumerated right implied by the Constitution, specifically the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—a right to privacy, protecting people’s decision-making in intimate matters such as reproduction and sexuality. Some people, even in the pro-choice camp, were not particularly taken by this line of reasoning; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for one, made it clear that she would have preferred Roe to be grounded in an argument about gender equality under the law. But the Constitution’s silence on abortion was trickier for jurists inclined to rule against reproductive rights—they were more likely to be originalists, and therefore to rely on justification in history and tradition, and in the specific text of the Constitution.

Justice Samuel Alito, in his majority opinion in Dobbs, had to concede that, at the founding of the United States, abortion was allowed everywhere in the new country until the stage of quickening, when a pregnant person can detect fetal movement (usually at about sixteen to eighteen weeks). But Alito asserted that “the most important historical fact” was that at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment—which, in 1868, granted due process and equal protection of the law to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—many states had enacted laws that made abortion a crime even before quickening. The very existence of such laws, he reasoned, meant that a right to abortion could not be justified with reference to the Constitution.

38

Advocates of fetal personhood, meanwhile, argued that, far from protecting the right to abortion, the Fourteenth Amendment protected the right to life of the fetus, from the very moment of conception. In National Review in June of 2023, a group of anti-abortion leaders and legal scholars, including Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, and Robert P. George, a legal scholar at Princeton, published what became known as the “new North Star letter,” setting a post-Dobbs goal of recognizing fetal personhood. “The 14th amendment expressly forbids the states from denying to ‘any person within [their] jurisdictions the equal protection of the laws,’ ” they wrote. “No exceptions to the equal protection principle are stated, implied, or even contemplated. The principle, on its very face, extends to everyone without distinction of race, ethnicity, sex, age, size, location, stage of development, or condition of dependency.” This meant that fetal-homicide and child-endangerment laws for the “preborn” must be enforced; that “children in the womb” must be “afforded due process and legal representation,” along with child tax credits; and that frozen embryos could not be “discarded and destroyed.” In Roe, the Court had briefly considered whether the word “person” in the Fourteenth Amendment (and elsewhere in the Constitution) applied to fetuses, but decided that it almost always applied “post-natally.” Surely, this would be the most commonsense reading, not least because the amendment’s purpose was to extend civil and legal rights to formerly enslaved people in the aftermath of the Civil War.

There was a drive to restrict abortion in late-nineteenth-century America, but, as Ziegler points out, it did not have much to do with the Constitution or the rights of the fertilized human egg. Horatio Storer, a doctor allied with the newly formed American Medical Association, saw the regulation of abortion as a way to burnish the professional reputations of his fellow-doctors, distinguishing them from midwives and other irregular practitioners who offered medicaments and procedures to end unwanted pregnancies. (“Restoring the menses” was the euphemism.) Storer also fretted that abortion was “infinitely more frequent among Protestant women than among Catholic,” and that the new Western territories would be populated by the wrong sort. And he considered the existence of marriages in which “conception or the birth of children is intentionally prevented” to be shameful advertisements of lust. Lust, along with the urgent need to police it, was the overriding preoccupation of the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock when he took up the campaign against abortion, in the eighteen-sixties. In these arguments, the fetus was a recessive, even shadowy figure.

39

It wasn’t until the nineteen-sixties, and the birth of the modern anti-abortion movement, that fetal personhood became a central, animating doctrine for crusaders against legalization. Abortion itself had never gone away. Starting in the nineteen-forties, a woman with the means and the determination to do so could have her case pondered by a committee of doctors with the authority to grant her a so-called therapeutic abortion in a hospital. (The committee might conclude, for example, that her reproductive organs would be damaged by childbirth or that she would be suicidal if forced to carry the pregnancy to term.) If her circumstances were rougher—if she were younger, poorer, or unmarried, for instance—she could risk going to an illegal practitioner who might or might not treat her with anything like the appropriate care. By the early sixties, Ziegler observes, nearly half the maternal deaths in New York City were the result of botched abortion. “Abortion opponents saw figures like these as further reason to suppress the procedure,” she writes, “but they struck other doctors and advocates quite differently: if the procedure could be performed safely”—and there was by then plenty of evidence that it could be—“every death due to illegal abortions was a scandal and a tragedy.” The campaign to legalize abortion was initially led by doctors who saw a chance to save lives, but they were soon joined by birth-control advocates concerned about population growth and later by feminists and sexual revolutionaries. And, as these advocates began to rack up successes, measured in new state laws and changes in public opinion, a countermovement took shape. In this movement—it would eventually call itself “pro-life”—Catholic theologians at first dominated, and the unborn took center stage.

40

Eugene Quay, the man Ziegler calls “the most prominent antiabortion advocate of the time,” was a well-known figure in Catholic and legal circles in Chicago. He took an extreme stance on abortion but was at pains to connect it to American morality rather than to Catholic doctrine, an association that he felt might limit its appeal. “If there could be any authority to destroy an innocent life for social considerations,” he wrote in the early nineteen-sixties, “it would still be in the interests of society to sacrifice such a mother rather than the child who might otherwise prove to be normal and decent.” In 1962, another Chicagoan, the theologian Father Francis Filas, told a newspaper reporter that “every unborn child must be regarded as a human person with all the rights of a human person from the moment of conception.”

A few years later, Robert Byrn, a law professor at Fordham University, took the argument in an au-courant direction, framing abortion in terms of discrimination against the unborn. His emphasis on due process for the unborn and his flair for the dramatic gesture—he once petitioned a court to be named the legal guardian of all the fetuses scheduled for abortion in New York City—helped set the tone for the anti-abortion movement of the future: socially conservative, and combative. As the movement grew, folding in more Protestant evangelicals—and turning, at the grassroots, to clinic blockades and, at the margins, to violence against abortion providers—it retained its focus on the rights of the fetus.

Hawkins, the thirty-nine-year-old leader of the increasingly high-profile Students for Life of America, embodies the totalizing ambitions of the post-Dobbs anti-abortion movement: its rightward shift and its revived North Star. She talks a lot about fetal personhood and opposes certain contraceptives, including the Pill. (The Pill mainly works by preventing ovulation, but it can also make the uterine lining less hospitable for a fertilized egg.) Her aims for the movement are one more piece of evidence giving the lie to the old argument—trotted out by Alito and Brett Kavanaugh for Dobbs—that overturning Roe would somehow cool the abortion debate by returning the matter to the states. In a 2023 profile on the BBC website, Hawkins described a new momentum: “Like, O.K., all of America is watching, push the gas pedal down on everything right now. More, more, more, more, more.” (In a detail that stuck with me from that profile, Hawkins, whose husband homeschools their four children, and who has been an anti-abortion activist since her teens, said that she didn’t have friends “in the traditional sense,” explaining, “Like, I don’t have girlfriends I go for brunch with. . . . What would I talk about besides ending abortion?”) Ziegler writes, “For half a century, she and her allies have seen themselves as fighting an era-defining human rights battle. It might take another generation or more to secure judicial recognition of fetal personhood, but that does not trouble the activists who had successfully destroyed Roe v. Wade. They have played the long game before.”

41

Ziegler makes the point more than once that the belief in fetal personhood is, for its proponents, sincere and fundamental, and surely it is for many in the movement. But it is striking to read how malleable this particular argument has been, in some ways—how strategically responsive to the times. In the early sixties, when activists worried that faith-based arguments might doom them politically, and when the courts had begun recognizing the civil rights of Black Americans, Byrn and others made the argument that, as Ziegler puts it, “classifying someone on the basis of residence in the womb was analogous to racial discrimination.” In the nineteen-eighties, during the tough-on-crime Reagan era, the fetus reëmerged in some anti-abortion rhetoric as the ultimate crime victim. Toward the end of the decade, as the movement grew closer to conservative legal circles, including the Federalist Society, it drew more on constitutional-originalist arguments. And when the Supreme Court recognized corporations as persons, or uncannily personlike entities, with respect to free-speech rights exercised through campaign donations and religious-conscience exemptions, people like the influential conservative lawyer James Bopp “hoped that justices willing at times to treat businesses as persons might be willing to do the same for the unborn child,” Ziegler writes. Her “Personhood” is a field guide to the seemingly boundless tactical resourcefulness of the anti-abortion movement.

Ziegler is one of the leading historians of reproductive politics, a generous and frequent commentator in the press, and the author of several previous books that deal to a greater or lesser extent with the anti-abortion movement. The focus of this book is important, but perhaps leads her to overestimate the power of the fetal-personhood argument in a society where some of that doctrine’s logical conclusions would be profoundly objectionable to many, many Americans. I.V.F. offers a prime example. In February of 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that embryos created through in-vitro fertilization were to be considered children. Fearing legal action, some fertility clinics in the state promptly paused their operations. In March, the G.O.P.-led Alabama state legislature rushed to pass a bill granting civil and criminal immunity to I.V.F. providers and receivers. (Forty-two per cent of American adults say that they have availed themselves of fertility treatment or personally know someone who has, according to the Pew Research Center.) Trump was nervous enough about the fallout that he called himself, weirdly, “the father of I.V.F.” on the campaign trail, and in February he signed an executive order promising to make fertility treatment more accessible.

42

One snag Ziegler does not deal with here is birthright citizenship—presumably because the book was completed before Trump signed an executive order revoking it. In the Trump world view, a baby born in the United States can be a citizen only if one or both of its parents are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. (The executive order contradicts how citizenship is defined in the Constitution, and several federal courts have blocked enforcement of it.) But for fetal-personhood advocates an embryo is already under U.S. jurisdiction and specifically entitled to the protections of its Constitution by dint of its location in a womb on U.S. soil. For those occupying the overlapping category of Trump supporter and fetal-personhood booster, this would seem to present, at the least, a rhetorical problem.

Legislators in some states have been emboldened to push fetal-personhood bills, politically viable or not, marking a split from the mainstream anti-abortion movement’s focus on punishing providers of abortion or, lately, people who assist others in obtaining one, rather than punishing the abortion patients themselves. (For a long time, movement leaders urged a “Love the sinner, hate the sin” approach.) As of March, 2025, bills redefining abortion as homicide had been introduced in at least ten states. These do not always get very far. In Iowa, for instance, G.O.P. legislators blocked a bill that would have made it a felony to “cause the death” of an “unborn person,” worried, apparently, that it would generate trouble for I.V.F. But the bills have changed the rhetorical landscape.

Perhaps the biggest shot in the arm for the fetal-personhood movement came in the form of an executive order ostensibly unrelated to abortion, one with an especially unwieldy and Orwellian name: Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. The order proclaims, with unwarranted confidence, that “ ‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. ‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

The implications were not lost on anti-abortion advocates, and it wasn’t paranoia that made those on the other side sit up and take notice. At this year’s March for Life rally, on a cold January day in Washington, D.C., the mood and the language were uncompromising—every abortion facility in the country had to be shut down, and abortion had to become, as one student activist put it, “unthinkable.” When Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, took to the stage, he brought up Trump’s executive order early in his speech: “I don’t know if you saw his executive order on gender, but it defines life as beginning at conception, rather than birth.” Johnson put invisible air quotes around “gender,” but he came down hard on the word “conception,” jabbing one finger in the air as he said it. The crowd cheered. Ideas have consequences. ♦︎

43

Slate

You’ll Never Guess When Pro-Life Hospitals Consider “Unborn Life” Not Actually Alive

BY JILL WIEBER LENS

APRIL 24 2025 6:19 PM

After Roe fell in 2022, MercyOne, a Catholic health system based in Iowa, released this statement: “As a Catholic health system, MercyOne believes all life is sacred including the lives of pregnant women and unborn children. MercyOne does not allow elective abortions” but “will save the life of the mother” if she has “life-threatening complications in pregnancy.” Abortion remained legal in Iowa for another two years and is still legal if a fetal heartbeat is undetectable. But MercyOne has said it remains committed to the sanctity of unborn life.

With apparently one exception. Recently, within a medical malpractice lawsuit arising from the stillbirth of a baby at approximately 36 weeks of pregnancy, a MercyOne hospital in Des Moines and its fellow defendants sang a different tune. They argued that this death of an unborn life wasn’t a serious injury or a substantial loss of bodily function. The defendants, again including a Catholic hospital, argue that the baby’s stillbirth wasn’t even a death, arguing that fetal death is not death and referring to the baby as a nonexistent person.

Why would the Catholic hospital belittle unborn life so? Simply, money. Minimizing the injury is within their financial interests. And apparently, financial interests are strong enough to override the sacredness of unborn life. In the abortion context, a sacred, unborn life is killed. In the context of allegations that medical malpractice caused stillbirth, really nothing happened.

The hypocrisy is obvious. But don’t overlook the crassness, only adding to the trauma for these plaintiffs grieving their daughter’s potentially preventable stillbirth. Those plaintiffs are Miranda Anderson and Landen Anderson. In 2021, the Andersons were looking forward to the birth of their daughter, whom they had named Eloise Irene. Miranda was 35 weeks, 5 days pregnant when she began having symptoms of preeclampsia. She received medical treatment numerous times in the next week and was always sent home. Eight days 

44

after her first visit after the appearance of symptoms, her baby was dead. Miranda gave birth to her dead baby daughter via C-section delivery. The Andersons’ lawsuit alleges that Eloise would be alive today had the medical providers acted properly and timely induced labor.

The defendants are trying to limit their liability by way of Iowa’s cap on the recovery of noneconomic damages—damages without a market value, like damages for emotional distress and lost parent-child relationship—in a medical malpractice claim. Under state law, plaintiffs in these cases can recover only $250,000 in noneconomic damages unless the plaintiff’s injury constitutes “substantial or permanent loss or impairment of bodily function, substantial disfigurement, or death.”  MercyOne and its fellow defendants argue that none of these exceptions apply. Again, the Catholic Hospital even argues that fetal death as late as 36 weeks is not death; baby Eloise was not (yet) alive.

MercyOne’s argument also includes another minimizing sentiment—that the Andersons really haven’t suffered much injury because they can have another baby. This is common in wrongfully caused pregnancy loss cases (and in pregnancy loss narratives generally); the loss is often devalued because the woman can simply have another baby. Specifically, the defendants argue that Anderson’s reproductive abilities still “function in a normal manner.” Well, yes, but this sentiment ignores the possible trauma of subsequent pregnancy and the increased risk of stillbirth due to her prior stillbirth. Relatedly, the defendants dismiss the possibility of Anderson’s injury is minimal because, again, their reproductive abilities still function in a normal manner.

MercyOne is hypocritically bending itself into a pretzel to serve its financial interests. Perversely, “dead babies”—those who do not survive childbirth—are much cheaper in medical malpractice litigation that “damaged babies”—those who do survive but with traumatic injuries—especially in a state like Iowa with a cap on noneconomic damages. A living but injured baby means both economic and noneconomic damages, and the economic damages could be extensive—medical expenses for a NICU stay, possibly long-lasting medical expenses continuing for injuries. Medical expense economic damages are not capped; defendants will have to pay all of them if liable for medical malpractice. But dead, unborn babies create only noneconomic damages for the parents. From a medical malpractice liability perspective, dead, unborn babies are preferred.

We wait to see how Iowa courts will handle this Catholic hospital’s arguments diminishing the Andersons’ injury. If the courts agree, as I argue in my recently published book Stillbirth & the Law, the result would not be unique to Iowa. Noneconomic damage caps are common in red states, the same states that are more likely to ban abortion. There is no question in Texas law that if medical malpractice causes the death of unborn life, the health care provider is liable to the formerly pregnant woman only for $250,000—even though Texas legislators, like the Iowa-based Catholic hospital, claim to believe in the sacredness of unborn life. This may be surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Again, apparently not all unborn life is sacred.
 

45

Republican’s Life-Threatening Pregnancy Collided With Florida’s Abortion Politics

Due in August with her first child, Rep. Kat Cammack says doctors last year hesitated to treat her ectopic pregnancy.

By Katy Stech Ferek  June 22, 2025, 12:00 pm EDT

Rep. Kat Cammack arrived at the emergency room in May 2024 terrified by what she had just learned: Her pregnancy could kill her at any moment.

It would only get worse. The Florida Republican needed a shot of methotrexate to help expel her ectopic pregnancy, in which there is no way for the embryo to survive. Her state’s six-week abortion ban had just taken effect. She said doctors and nurses who saw her said they were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail if they gave her drugs to end her pregnancy. 

She began arguing her case. The staff resisted, she said, even though doctors earlier that day estimated she was just five weeks pregnant. There was no heartbeat, and her life was at risk. She pulled up the state law on her phone for hospital workers to read. She said she called the governor’s office for help, but no one picked up. 

Hours later, doctors finally agreed to give her the methotrexate, Cammack said. 

The Florida ban, which took effect May 1, 2024, made abortions illegal after six weeks with limited exceptions. It didn’t ban procedures for ectopic pregnancies, but concern about the law’s wording made doctors hesitant, said patients and physicians. Months later, Florida regulators gave guidance to address what they called misinformation, making clear that doctors should intervene in cases such as Cammack’s. 

Pregnant again and due this summer, Cammack said the politics of the incident linger with her. While Cammack opposes abortion and co-chairs the House Pro-Life Caucus, she supports exceptions for reported cases of rape and incest in the first trimester and in instances in which the mother’s life is at risk. 

46

Who is to blame?

Cammack doesn’t fault the Florida law for her experience. Instead, she accuses the left of scaring medical professionals with messaging that stressed that they could face criminal charges for violating the law. She said she feels those efforts gave medical staff reason to fear giving drugs even under legal circumstances.

“It was absolute fearmongering at its worst,” she said. She also knows that abortion-rights advocates might see the opposite—that the Republican-led restriction caused the confusion. “There will be some comments like, ‘Well, thank God we have abortion services,’ even though what I went through wasn’t an abortion,” she said. Cammack declined to name the hospital where she received care.

Abortion-rights advocates say the law created the problems. While Florida regulators say ectopic pregnancies aren’t abortions and are exempt from restrictions, the law doesn’t define ectopic pregnancy, and it isn’t always easy for doctors to tell where an embryo has implanted, said Molly Duane, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights. 

Asked whether abortion-rights groups contributed to confusion, Duane said Florida regulators had stressed how seriously they planned to enforce the ban. She said blaming medical workers echoes the “playbook of antiabortion extremists that for decades have been blaming and villainizing doctors.” 

Dr. Alison Haddock, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, said it is common for doctors in states that have restricted abortion access to worry “whether their clinical judgment will stand should there be any prosecution.” 

She called early pregnancy care, including instances of ectopic pregnancies, a “medically complicated space” where uncertainty in diagnoses and treatment plans is common. “This has been a real stress point for a lot of our physicians,” she said. 

Cammack, 37, who announced her current pregnancy at a White House event, is on track to become the 14th congresswoman to give birth while in office. Elected to Congress in 2020 after working as a top staff member, she has focused on securing money for Hurricane Helene victims and supporting veterans and farmers in her district in northern Florida.  

47

In a 90-minute interview, she spoke publicly about her miscarriage for the first time. She said she hopes sharing her experience steers conversations toward common ground. “I would stand with any woman—Republican or Democrat—and fight for them to be able to get care in a situation where they are experiencing a miscarriage and an ectopic” pregnancy, she said. 

She said the difficult political environment is to blame for preventing discussions on how to improve women’s healthcare. 

“We have turned the conversation about women’s healthcare into two camps: pink hats and pink ribbons,” she said. “It’s either breast cancer or abortion.” 

In her first year in Congress, she testified about her family’s ties to the issue. Her mother, a stroke survivor, was told by doctors to terminate her pregnancy with Cammack, warning that it put her at risk of another stroke. She went on to deliver Cammack without problems.

‘Am I losing the baby?’

From her office couch on Capitol Hill, Cammack recounted her health scare, pausing several times to clutch her third-trimester belly and count baby kicks. 

Last year, she and her husband, Matt Harrison, began trying to have a baby. On May 21, she woke up bleeding heavily. She pulled out a pregnancy test that came with the ovulation kit she ordered off Amazon. It was positive. 

“Then it’s this emotional roller coaster of, ‘Oh, my God. Am I pregnant? And am I losing the baby?’ ” she said. 

Her doctor confirmed that she might be miscarrying. There was no treatment to offer. So Cammack said she put on “the biggest maxi pad” she could find and got on a plane to D.C. 

She loaded her schedule with decoy dentist appointments to slip away for blood draws to test the level of pregnancy hormones, which continued to rise. 

On May 31, back in Florida, a doctor found the embryo implanted where the fallopian tube meets the uterus, considered a cornual ectopic pregnancy. “If this ruptures, it’ll kill you,” he told her. 

Medical professionals said surgery to remove the embryo put her at risk of losing her uterus. She opted for the shot of methotrexate, which blocks folic acid needed by the embryo to grow. 

48

Her biggest takeaway: She was lucky to go through the ordeal with a network of people to lean on. 

“What happens to women who don’t have a car? What happens to the women who don’t have their doctor’s cellphone number? Hell—do they have a doctor? What happens to them?” she said.

She wants other women who have an ectopic pregnancy to have hope. She said, “You start having some, you know, soul-searching moments of, ‘Can I get pregnant again?’”

She paused. Tears appeared in her eyes. “And you can,” she said through an exhale. 

The politics of pregnancy

Cammack said she believes her perspective is an important counterweight on policy issues among House Republicans, where the average lawmaker age is nearly 60 and men outnumber women by around 6 to 1. 

One of her male Republican colleagues “almost sunk under the table” when she mentioned breast-feeding to him recently. She also wishes they would stop touching her belly. “Like, please stop,” she said. “It’s so weird.” 

As a member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce’s health subcommittee and founder of the Republican Women’s Caucus, she has criticized what she sees as low federal spending on research and development related to women’s health. She voted to pass President Trump’s tax and spending megabill but said concerns she had about its cuts potentially leading to hospital closures weren’t fully addressed.

Cammack said she has met with fertility-treatment companies that, like her, are worried about in vitro fertilization restrictions, and with Heidi Murkoff, the author of “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” to discuss healthcare on military bases. She has pushed legislation to expand state investigations into maternal deaths. 

Cammack is due in mid-August, during Congress’s scheduled monthlong recess. She said she is prepared to miss votes in July at her doctor’s recommendation but plans to be back after Labor Day. She said she didn’t support an idea, proposed by two female lawmakers who recently had babies, to allow new parents to vote remotely for a few weeks after birth. 

“ A lot of moms have to be right back to work,” she said. “I knew what I signed up for when I got elected.”

49

The Guardian 

Republican representative’s ectopic pregnancy clashes with Florida abortion law

Kat Cammack blames left’s fearmongering after medical staff hesitated to give her drugs needed to end pregnancy

Edward Helmore

18:21 EDT Sunday, 22 June 2025

A Florida Republican congresswoman is blaming fearmongering on the left for the reluctance of hospital staff to give her the drugs she needed to end an ectopic pregnancy that threatened her life.

Kat Cammack went to the emergency room in May 2024 where it was estimated she was five weeks into an ectopic pregnancy, there was no heartbeat and her life was at risk. Doctors determined she needed a shot of methotrexate to help expel her pregnancy but since Florida’s six week abortion ban had just taken effect medical staff were worried about losing their licenses or going to jail if they did.

Cammack looked up the state law on her phone to show staff and even attempted to contact the governor’s office. Hours later, doctors eventually agreed to give her the medication.

But Cammack, who opposes abortion and co-chairs the House pro-life caucus, told the Wall Street Journal she blames messaging from pro-abortion groups for delaying her treatment, which is not banned under Florida’s restrictive statutes, who have created fear of criminal charges.

Over a year later and once again pregnant and due to give birth soon, Cammack says the politics of the incident have stuck with her.

“It was absolute fearmongering at its worst,” Cammack told the publication, but acknowledged that abortion rights groups might interpret her experience differently and blame Republican-led, restrictive anti-abortion laws for the issue.

“There will be some comments like, ‘Well, thank God we have abortion services,’ even though what I went through wasn’t an abortion,” she told the outlet.

Florida’s strict abortion ban, which took effect on 1 May 2024, makes abortions illegal after six weeks, when most people aren’t even aware yet that they are pregnant.

50

After months in which medical staff were concerned that the law’s wording made emergency procedures illegal, the state’s healthcare agency issued official guidance to “address misinformation” on permitting an abortion in instances where the pregnant person’s life and health are in danger.

Cammack said she hoped that going public with her experience would help opposing political groups find common ground.

“I would stand with any woman – Republican or Democrat – and fight for them to be able to get care in a situation where they are experiencing a miscarriage and an ectopic” pregnancy, she said.

Abortion rights activists say the law created problems. Florida regulators say ectopic pregnancies aren’t abortions and are exempt from restrictions, but Molly Duane, with the Center for Reproductive Rights, told the Wall Street Journal the law doesn’t define ectopic pregnancy, which can be difficult to diagnose.

Alison Haddock, the president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, told the outlet care in early pregnancy is a “medically complicated space” and that doctors in abortion-restricted states worry “whether their clinical judgment will stand should there be any prosecution”.

51

Dallas Morning News

‘A walking coffin’: Under Texas abortion laws, some women are forced to endure stillbirth

A San Antonio woman had no choice but to continue a pregnancy after her baby stopped growing. He became her third stillbirth.

By Lauren Caruba   01:15 AM on Aug 18, 2025

Some babies never make it to birth. Some — and there is no easy way to say this — are born to die.

During pregnancy, a woman’s body undergoes fundamental changes to accommodate the growth of a fetus. The mother’s blood volume increases as much as 50% as her body creates an entirely new organ — the placenta — that facilitates the baby’s development.

The birth of each healthy baby requires all of these complex processes to happen in harmony. When everything goes right, it’s a small miracle.

When even one of these stages is disrupted, the consequences can be catastrophic.

Take, for example, amniotic fluid. The life-sustaining liquid cushions the fetus and aids in the development of major organs such as the lungs. If fluid levels decrease too much, too soon, the fetus no longer has what it needs to grow. Problems with the placenta can also inhibit fetal growth.

In these cases, the risk of stillbirth increases, and the baby’s death can be inevitable. Under Texas’ abortion laws, there are no provisions for complications that threaten fetal development. Because of that, Texas parents have limited autonomy in deciding how and when they say goodbye to babies who are not expected to live. State law dictates the treatment choices mothers have in those situations.

If the fetus still has a heartbeat, even if the chances of survival are virtually nonexistent, a mother in Texas must continue to carry that pregnancy. During that time, there is nothing for parents and doctors to do but wait for the baby to die. That death can happen when the baby is in the womb, during childbirth or in the moments or hours after birth. No matter when it happens, it’s traumatic and emotionally devastating.

The law has another repercussion. A procedure commonly used for abortions in the second trimester — a dilation and evacuation of the uterus, or D&E — is legal in instances where the fetus has already died. The problem is that many specialists who can perform that procedure have left Texas in the wake of the abortion bans. As a result, women are sometimes forced to endure the anguish of labor and birth for a baby that has already died.

52

Some parents want to hold their baby for the precious minutes or hours they may have together. Others cannot bear the thought.

What it comes down to is choice, said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN who has treated patients with high-risk pregnancies in San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. Before the abortion bans, doctors could follow the national standard of care, counseling their patients and making a decision together that honored their emotional and physical well-being.

Most of the time, he said, those patients chose to terminate their pregnancies. They rarely regretted that decision. That was not always the case, he said, for parents who chose to continue with a pregnancy.

“A number of patients, in retrospect, have told me, ‘I wish I’d had a D&E,’” he said. “Not to get too graphic, but a 25-week fetal demise that perhaps has been dead for a week or two is not a pleasant sight to look at.”

It’s hard to predict who will face pregnancy complications. The cruel reality, experts say, is that it can happen to anyone.

Once parents discover their baby has a life-limiting diagnosis, moments that previously sparked joy — a baby’s kick, for example — become reminders of their child’s unavoidable fate. The longer they live with the doomed pregnancy, said Dr. Deborah Bartz, the more emotionally painful the prognosis becomes.

A walking coffin

“Patients often talk about feeling like a coffin — like they are a walking coffin with these anomalous pregnancies,” said Bartz, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a reproductive medicine specialist in Boston. “They’re just waiting for this baby to die within them. I mean, how traumatic is that?”

The Dallas Morning News interviewed three women whose stories, to varying degrees, illustrate that trauma. Two of the women wanted to terminate their pregnancies after problems were identified but instead experienced stillbirths because they were unable to travel out of state. The third woman was holding out hope her baby might survive, only to ultimately endure the visceral nature of giving birth in the second trimester.

As a result of their experiences, all three women suffer from fear and anxiety surrounding the prospect of future pregnancies.

Early on in her second pregnancy, Taylor Ard knew something was wrong. She knew, because she had been there before.

In her first pregnancy, in 2017, she was diagnosed with intrauterine growth restriction, where the fetus does not develop as expected, making it far smaller than it should be. The condition, which can be linked to issues with the placenta or umbilical cord, raises the risk of premature labor and stillbirth.

Her son, born at the end of the second trimester, barely survived. He weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces, and spent three months in a Dallas neonatal intensive care unit. He was her miracle baby.

53

The pregnancy and birth were hard on Taylor. She was hospitalized for a month before her son was delivered via emergency cesarean section. Doctors couldn’t explain why her placenta wasn’t healthy, but they warned her it could happen again in future pregnancies.

When she became pregnant in 2023, at age 27, she told her doctor about the complications she experienced with her son. There was nothing to do but wait and see how this baby grew.

In her gut, Taylor could tell something was wrong. She very nearly had lost her son; her doctor at the time told her he had a 50-50 chance of survival. She didn’t want to go through that again.

Taylor was mad at herself, at her body. Why couldn’t she produce healthy babies?

Early in her pregnancy, her gut feeling was confirmed. Ultrasounds showed her baby was tracking behind — even further behind than her son. Taylor received another growth restriction diagnosis, this one severe.

There were other problems with the pregnancy. Taylor’s body swelled. Her blood pressure rose. Half the time, she couldn’t feel the baby moving. Her doctor had her come in weekly for monitoring, something that typically doesn’t happen until the end of pregnancy.

Taylor was conflicted. She knew abortion was illegal in Texas. She considered traveling to another state, but she couldn’t drop everything — work, caring for her son. She couldn’t just leave.

With every appointment’s confirmation that the baby wasn’t growing fast enough, Taylor’s mind returned to the unattainable idea of termination. At the same time, she knew her son wanted a sibling.

She was stuck. It was scary and frustrating to feel like she didn’t have a choice over her baby’s — and her own — health care.

In February 2024, at 24 weeks, Taylor went to the hospital in Dallas. Her blood pressure had risen, and her head ached. She was admitted for two days.

During an ultrasound, the baby’s weight was estimated to be 11.7 ounces — less than the 1st percentile for that gestational age. The blood flow to the umbilical cord was reversed, a sign that her placenta wasn’t functioning properly. The fetus, one doctor wrote in Taylor’s medical records, was “non-viable at this time.”

54

On the second day, the hospital sent a chaplain to counsel Taylor and pray with her, even though she wasn’t religious. All of the terror she felt during her son’s birth and recovery came rushing back. Her worst fear — reliving it — was becoming reality.

About two weeks later, she visited her OB-GYN in Mesquite for an appointment. During the ultrasound, the baby wasn’t moving. Medical staff asked if Taylor had felt the baby move at all in the past day or two. She hadn’t.

This was it, Taylor realized. Her baby was gone.

Taylor was instructed to check herself into the hospital next door. Even though her baby had died, she still needed to proceed with delivery.

Despite her previous C-section, the doctor at the hospital told her they wanted to avoid the surgery this time around due to the risk of bleeding. Instead, they would induce labor. Taylor received Cytotec to help open her cervix, then Pitocin to trigger contractions.

Taylor was not prepared for how long labor would take. She hadn’t experienced it with her first birth.

One day passed. Then another. And another.

Since Taylor had received an epidural, she was confined to the hospital bed. Nurses tried to stimulate contractions by pushing on her belly.

Nothing seemed to be working. At one point, Taylor asked if she could leave. She just wanted to go home.

Taylor was only in the second trimester. At this stage of her pregnancy, her body was not ready to give birth.

Bartz, the Harvard physician, said second-trimester births can be unpredictable.

“It’s a total crapshoot with regards to how quickly versus how slow certain aspects of the process go,” she said. “Sometimes it gets stuck, and it’s just a horrible, long, prolonged process.”

On the fourth day, a doctor came into Taylor’s hospital room. The medications, she explained, were working, but slowly. She manually broke Taylor’s water to speed things up.

55

Finally, Taylor was ready to give birth. For hours, she pushed on her back. She needed to take frequent breaks.

The worst part was when the baby became stuck, halfway out. She said she stayed like that, her feet in stirrups, for almost two hours.

After four days of labor, she delivered her stillborn baby. It was another boy. She named him Abram.

Then, Taylor tried to deliver the placenta. It was the worst pain she had ever endured — worse than getting her tattoos, worse than the C-section she needed with her previous pregnancy and worse than the actual delivery of Abram.

Hospital staff eventually removed the placenta in the operating room with a dilation and curettage, a type of procedure where tissue is removed by scraping the uterine lining. It’s often used for first-trimester abortions.

Taylor remains frustrated by the lack of support she received from medical providers. No one could tell her why her body could not carry babies to full term. Her labor and delivery, she said, should not have taken as long as they did.

More than a year after giving birth to Abram, Taylor still experiences lower back pain from being on an epidural for days, as well as lingering abdominal discomfort. The toll, both mental and physical, could have been avoided, she said, had she been able to access the abortion she wanted when she was first diagnosed.

56

“It would have saved me a lot of trauma,” Taylor said, “and then to not be so scared to try to have a baby again.”

In Taylor’s case, doctors practiced expectant management — waiting and seeing. It’s something that is happening more frequently under Texas’ abortion laws in cases where there are fetal complications. Dr. Rebecca Cohen, an OB-GYN practicing in Denver, said this more conservative approach can have downsides.

“Part of the conversation that we have with people, when we’re talking about a treatment, one of the options is always expectant management, or doing nothing,” Cohen said. “But I almost can’t even say those phrases without immediately following it with: ‘But doing nothing has risks.’”

Some of those risks were quantified in a July study by researchers in Dallas. Physicians with UT Southwestern Medical Center studied the outcomes of patients who continued pregnancies with life-limiting fetal diagnoses before and after Texas began restricting abortion in late 2021. When patients no longer had pregnancy termination as an option, there were more cases of preeclampsia, which causes high blood pressure in pregnancy. Deliveries by C-section more than doubled. None of the babies survived.

Almost 300 miles south of where Taylor lived, another Texas mother wondered why she kept losing babies.

In 2019, the South Texas woman — whom The News is not naming due to fears of legal repercussions — experienced her first stillbirth. In 2023, it happened again, this time with twins. Only one baby made it, born prematurely via C-section.

When she became pregnant again later that year, she was crippled by anxiety. Things that were routine aspects of other women’s pregnancies — appointments, scheduling calls, scans and test results — presented another opportunity to receive bad news.

At 25 weeks, it happened. At an appointment with her maternal-fetal medicine specialist, she learned there was almost no amniotic fluid around her baby boy. He had stopped growing weeks earlier.

Her doctor did not expect him to make it. His chance of survival, she estimated, was less than 3%.

58

There was nothing more the doctor could do. The baby had a heartbeat. Unless the woman’s life was threatened, they couldn’t terminate the pregnancy under Texas law.

The woman could sense her doctor felt as powerless as she did. She could tell that so much was being left unsaid.

As she saw it, she had two options: Leave the state to end her pregnancy on her own terms, or stay and wait for the inevitable loss of her baby.

She couldn’t bear it. Seeing her baby, lifeless on an ultrasound. Hearing the absence of a heartbeat. Feeling the pain of delivering a baby who would never take a breath.

Leaving Texas was impossible. Her efforts to fundraise for the trip went nowhere, and her insurance wouldn’t cover an out-of-state abortion. She also had four children to care for. It became increasingly clear she would have no say in how this pregnancy would end. She felt helpless. Depression crept in.

At home, the woman prepared her young children — and herself — for what was about to happen. As much as she didn’t want to, she had to accept it.

“He may go to heaven,” she told them, “in mommy’s tummy, before he’s born.”

A few weeks later, the woman started experiencing contractions while outside with her children. They grew longer and more painful. She knew it was time to go to the hospital.

After she arrived at the hospital, a doctor scheduled her for a C-section. Delivering vaginally carried a high risk of uterine rupture due to multiple previous C-sections, including one earlier that same year.

Lack of control had become a central theme in this pregnancy, so perhaps it was unsurprising when the woman’s body failed to cooperate with that schedule. Labor progressed too quickly for her to go to the operating room. Late that morning, hours before her scheduled surgery, she delivered her baby boy. He had already died.

58

It all felt so unfair. Unfair that she lost her badly wanted child. Unfair that this kept happening to her. And unfair, she believes, that Texas law had limited the medical care she could receive.

It made her fearful of what would happen if she became pregnant again. Her doctor didn’t advise it, either. Her history of unexplained stillbirths — autopsies of the fetuses had yielded no answers — coupled with the laws, made pregnancy risky for her.

So when her birth control failed this January, she and her husband were left with a decision. For days, they weighed the potential consequences of continuing a pregnancy her doctor had advised against.

They knew all too well there was no guarantee the pregnancy would result in a healthy baby. Could they handle, once again, listening to the cries of other newborns in the hospital, having just lost their own? Could they handle telling their children that, for a fourth time, that they had lost a sibling? Could they handle planning another baby’s funeral?

No. They couldn’t.

As devastating as an abortion might be, they concluded, yet another stillbirth would be worse.

The woman would have preferred to have gone to a clinic. She would have preferred ending her pregnancy under the care of medical professionals. She was scared of experiencing complications from the abortion that might necessitate going to the emergency room, of the questions she might face there.

She ordered pills from a reputable online provider, one that made the process feel less incriminating, less shameful. Late one night, after her children were asleep, she took the pills, her husband by her side. It felt intimate, and peaceful.

This Texas mother believes the state’s laws ignore women like her, who find themselves in unimaginable circumstances. She had wanted to grow her family, but it seemed that her health, and that of her babies, hadn’t mattered.

“What needs to change?” she said. “It all needs to change.”

59

A difficult pregnancy

Deaundria Marsh would never want another woman to experience a pregnancy like hers.

From the time she found out she was pregnant with her second child in the spring of 2024, when she was 23, something always seemed to go wrong. First, she struggled to establish prenatal care; the doctor she normally saw in Dallas had long wait times. Next, an ultrasound identified a clot near the fetus’ head. That problem resolved itself, but then she started bleeding and leaking fluid.

The worst news came when Deaundria was 16 weeks pregnant. Another ultrasound showed there was no amniotic fluid around the baby — a complication that jeopardized the development of the lungs and other major organs. A blood test also showed an elevated risk of fetal abnormalities. There was a high chance the baby would be born prematurely.

Deaundria’s pregnancy had grown too complicated for her OB-GYN’s practice. She was referred to a doctor in southern Dallas. There, she was told the amniotic sac had ruptured. Her baby had a very low chance of survival. The doctor mentioned the possibility of inducing labor.

Deaundria was overwhelmed and distraught. She didn’t want to hear that. She didn’t want to hear any of it.

Over the next two weeks, she saw multiple specialists, who all told her variations of the same thing. Sometimes there was a little fluid, sometimes there was none, but there simply wasn’t enough of it to facilitate her baby’s growth. The odds of survival weren’t good, but they weren’t zero, either.

One doctor mentioned the possibility of an amnioinfusion, a procedure where saline or another solution is injected into the uterus in an attempt to increase fluid levels. There was no guarantee it would work. They could discuss it further at their next appointment.

Deaundria frequently left appointments confused and frustrated, with paperwork that she didn’t fully understand. It felt like the information she received from different doctors was conflicting and that her questions went unanswered. She wished they would more clearly explain what was happening to her. She researched methods for increasing fluid levels on her own. She drank as much water as she could.

Every day, she held out hope that maybe, just maybe, her baby would make it.

One night in July 2024, when Deaundria was almost 19 weeks pregnant, she was watching a movie with her partner when she started cramping and passing blood clots. They headed to the hospital with Deaundria’s toddler in tow.

They arrived at the emergency room in Dallas before midnight. In the waiting room, Deaundria breathed through active contractions.

By the time she was seen by emergency room staff, hospital records show, both her pulse and blood pressure were elevated.

Over the next few hours, Deaundria waited. And waited. She kept expecting a doctor to come see her. She asked for pain medications, but a nurse said a doctor had to order them.

A little after 3 a.m., Deaundria felt a gush of blood exit her body. She stood up so the nurse could change the bedding. Another gush of blood splattered onto the floor. Deaundria felt the baby’s head crowning. She told her partner to take her daughter out of the room.

The nurse opened the door to call for help. By the time it closed, Deaundria was holding her baby — a girl — in her hands.

As Deaundria lifted her daughter, she felt panicked. She had never seen something like this in her life.

The baby, less than 19 weeks gestation, was the size of Deaundria’s palm. Her body was gelatinous, her skin a deep shade of pink. The baby was alive, moving and opening her mouth, but she was unable to take a breath. She raised her arms toward her mother. Deaundria began to cry.

“She looked like she wanted to scream, but she couldn’t,” Deaundria said. “I could tell that my daughter was in pain.”

60

Deaundria couldn’t look at her anymore.

One of the nurses helped Deaundria lay the baby down and get back into bed. The nurses listened as Deaundria blamed herself for what had happened. She explained that she didn’t have any amniotic fluid. She had done, she said, the best she could.

A doctor from the neonatal intensive care unit confirmed the baby, who was still weeks from viability, could not survive. Hospital staff would not attempt resuscitation.

Finally, Deaundria received medications for pain and nausea. As the umbilical cord was cut, Deaundria watched her baby’s body go limp. She was gone.

Hospital staff transferred Deaundria to the labor and delivery unit. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop reliving what had happened. She asked to speak with the unit’s manager, hitting record on her phone.

Deaundria shared the recording with The News.

Deaundria told the manager about how she didn’t receive any pain medications in the emergency room, and how the doctor didn’t show up until the very end. She told her she had caught the baby herself. The entire thing, she said, was traumatizing.

“I just wouldn’t want someone else to experience something like that,” Deaundria said, her toddler babbling in the background.

The manager was apologetic. She said the labor and delivery staff was trying to educate emergency staff about how to handle pregnancy loss.

“It’s kind of uncomfortable territory for them,” she told Deaundria. She added: “I am so sorry that happened that way.”

Medical experts who reviewed Deaundria’s records for The News said her care might not have changed under different abortion restrictions. Doctors, they said, do not like to rush to terminate wanted pregnancies, even when it’s likely that loss of the baby is inevitable. Deaundria’s body eventually recognized something was wrong and expelled the pregnancy on its own.

What her case does represent, those experts said, is how scarring pregnancy and childbirth can be. Her experience is one of the reasons why so many women who face complications later in pregnancy choose an abortion procedure over an induction of labor.

“The majority of people will choose D&E when it is offered — not all of them, but the majority,” said Cohen, the Denver physician. It is faster, she said, and allows patients to avoid prolonging a traumatic experience that will stay with them forever.

Deaundria named her daughter Zuri. She keeps her tiny jar of ashes on a shelf in her home in Commerce, where she moved in August to create some distance from the ordeal. After the miscarriage, her toddler grew even more clingy. She no longer wanted her mother to lay down in bed. It reminded her of what she looked like in the hospital room.

Like Taylor, and the South Texas woman, Deaundria feels like an abortion would have been less painful than what she and her family endured. Like those women, she was left feeling scared of pregnancy.

A few months later, she was forced to face those fears.

Her baby girl was born July 23, the day before she was due. She weighed 8 pounds, 4 ounces. Her name is Zaria.

                                                                                            61

PROPUBLICA

“Ticking Time Bomb”: A Pregnant Mother Kept Getting Sicker. She Died After She Couldn’t Get an Abortion in Texas.

by Kavitha Surana and Lizzie Presser, November 19, 6am ET

Tierra Walker had reached her limit. In the weeks since she’d learned she was pregnant, the 37-year-old dental assistant had been wracked by unexplained seizures and mostly confined to a hospital cot. With soaring blood pressure and diabetes, she knew she was at high risk of developing preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that could end her life. 

Her mind was made up on the morning of Oct. 14, 2024: For the sake of her 14-year-old son, JJ, she needed to ask her doctor for an abortion to protect her health. 

“Wouldn’t you think it would be better for me to not have the baby?” she asked a physician at Methodist Hospital Northeast near San Antonio, according to her aunt. Just a few years earlier, Walker had developed a dangerous case of preeclampsia that had led to the stillbirth of her twins.

But the doctor, her family said, told her what many other medical providers would say in the weeks that followed: There was no emergency; nothing was wrong with her pregnancy, only her health. 

Just after Christmas, on his birthday, JJ found his mom draped over her bed, lifeless. An autopsy would later confirm what she had feared: Preeclampsia killed her at 20 weeks pregnant.

Walker’s death is one of multiple cases ProPublica is investigating in which women with underlying health conditions died after they were unable to end their pregnancies.

Walker had known that abortion was illegal in Texas, but she had thought that hospitals could make an exception for patients like her, whose health was at risk. 

The reality: In states that ban abortion, patients with chronic conditions and other high-risk pregnancies often have nowhere to turn. 

They enter pregnancy sick and are expected to get sicker. Yet lawmakers who wrote the bans have refused to create exceptions for health risks. As a result, many hospitals and doctors, facing the threat of criminal charges, no longer offer these patients terminations, ProPublica found in interviews with more than 100 OB-GYNs across the country. 

62

Instead, these women are left to gamble with their lives. 

As Walker’s blood pressure swung wildly and a blood clot threatened to kill her, she continued to press doctors at prenatal appointments and emergency room visits, asking if it was safe for her to continue the pregnancy. Although one doctor documented in her medical record that she was at “high risk of clinical deterioration and/or death,” she was told over and over again that she didn’t need to worry, her relatives say. More than 90 doctors were involved in Walker’s care, but not one offered her the option to end her pregnancy, according to medical records. 

Walker’s case unfolded during the fall of 2024, when the dangers of abortion bans were a focus of protests, media coverage and electoral campaigns across the country. ProPublica had revealed that five women — three in Texas alone — had died after they were unable to access standard reproductive care under the new bans. 

ProPublica condensed more than 6,500 pages of Walker’s medical records into a summary of her care with the guidance of two high-risk pregnancy specialists. More than a dozen OB-GYNs reviewed the case for ProPublica and said that since Walker had persistently high blood pressure, it would have been standard medical practice to advise her of the serious risks of her pregnancy early on, to revisit the conversation as new complications emerged and to offer termination at any point if she wanted it. Some described her condition as a “ticking time bomb.” Had Walker ended her pregnancy, every expert believed, she would not have died. 

Many said that her case illustrated why they think all patients need the freedom to choose how much risk they are willing to take during pregnancy. Walker expressed that she didn’t want to take that risk, her family says. She had a vibrant life, a husband and son whom she loved. 

Under Texas’ abortion law, though, that didn’t matter.

On a hot September day, Walker was lying down with JJ after a walk with their two small dogs, Milo and Twinkie, when she started shaking uncontrollably. 

63

Terrified, JJ called 911, asking for an ambulance. 

As the only child of a single mom, JJ had always considered Walker his closest friend, coach and protector wrapped in one. In their mobile home, JJ was greeted each morning by his mom’s wide smile and upturned eyes, as she shot off vocabulary quizzes or grilled him on state capitals. He loved how fearlessly she went after what she wanted; in 2021, she had proposed to her boyfriend, Eric Carson, and the two eloped. She’d just been talking about moving the family to Austin for a promotion she was offered at a dental clinic. 

At the hospital, JJ was shocked to see her so pale and helpless, with wires snaking from her head and arms. 

To Walker’s surprise, doctors quickly discovered that she was five weeks pregnant. They also noted hypertension at levels so high that it reduces circulation to major organs and can cause a heart attack or stroke. That, and her weight, age and medical history, put Walker at an increased risk of developing preeclampsia, a pregnancy-related blood pressure disorder, said Dr. Jennifer Lewey, director of the Penn Women’s Cardiovascular Health Program and expert in hypertension.

“If I’m seeing a patient in her first trimester and her blood pressure is this uncontrolled — never mind anything else — what I’m talking about is: Your pregnancy will be so high risk, do we need to think about terminating the pregnancy and getting your health under control?” 

As Walker’s first trimester continued, she kept seizing. Her body convulsed, her eyes rolled back and she was often unable to speak for up to 30 minutes at a time. Some days, the episodes came in rapid waves, with little relief. 

For three weeks, she stayed at Methodist hospitals; doctors were not able to determine what was causing the spasms. Walker couldn’t get out of bed, in case a seizure made her fall, and this left her vulnerable to blood clots. She soon developed one in her leg that posed a new lethal threat: It could travel to her lungs and kill her instantly.

64

Carson watched over her during the day and her aunt Latanya Walker took the night shift. She was panicked that her tough niece, whose constant mantra was “quit your crying,” now seemed defeated. One evening, during Walker’s third hospitalization, when she was about 9 weeks pregnant, she told Latanya she’d had a vision during a seizure: Her grandmother and aunt, who had died years earlier, were preparing a place for her on the other side.

“You better tell them you’re not ready to go,” Latanya said. 

“I don’t know how much more I can take of this,” Walker whispered. 

The next morning, Walker called for a doctor and asked about ending her pregnancy for the sake of her health. “When we get you under control, then everything will go smoothly,” the doctor replied, Latanya recalled. The physician on the floor was not an OB-GYN with the expertise to give a high-risk consultation, but the Walkers didn’t realize that this mattered. By the time the doctor left the room, her aunt said, tears streamed down Walker’s cheeks.

Dr. Elizabeth Langen, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Michigan who reviewed Walker’s case, said a physician comfortable with high-risk pregnancies should have counseled her on the dangers of continuing and offered her an abortion. “The safest thing for her was to terminate this pregnancy, that’s for sure.”

During Walker’s many hospital and prenatal visits, 21 OB-GYNs were among the more than 90 physicians involved in her care. None of them counseled her on the option — or the health benefits — of a termination, according to medical records. 

In Texas, the law bars “aiding and abetting” an illegal abortion. As a result, many physicians have avoided even mentioning it, according to interviews with dozens of doctors. 

In her condition, Walker couldn’t fathom leaving the state. When her aunt suggested ordering abortion medication online, Walker was worried she could go to jail. She was spending so much time in the hospital; what if she got caught taking the pills? 

At 12 weeks pregnant, she was admitted to University Hospital. Doctors there noted that even on anticoagulation medication, the clotting in Walker’s leg was so profound that she needed a thrombectomy to remove it. 

65

“At this point, we’ve gone from ‘complicated, but within the realm of normal’ to ‘we’ve got someone with a major procedure in pregnancy that tells us something isn’t going well,’” said Dr. Will Williams, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in New Orleans, where an abortion ban is also in place. “In my practice, we’d have a frank discussion about whether this is a person we’d offer a termination to at the point of thrombectomy.”

ProPublica reached out to five physicians who were involved in key moments of Walker’s care: the hospitalist on duty on Oct. 14, 2024, when she asked about ending her pregnancy; three OB-GYNs; and a hospitalist on duty at the time of her thrombectomy. They did not respond. The hospitals Walker visited, including those run by University Health System and Methodist Healthcare, which is co-owned by HCA, did not comment on Walker’s care, despite permission from her family. Although the Walkers have not pursued legal action, they have engaged a lawyer. A University Health System spokesperson said that it is the company’s policy not to comment on potential litigation. 

In her second trimester, Walker’s seizures continued and her hypertension remained out of control. At an appointment on Dec. 27, at around 20 weeks, a doctor noted spiking blood pressure and sent her to University Hospital’s ER. There, doctors recorded a diagnosis of preeclampsia. 

The experts who reviewed Walker’s vital signs for ProPublica said her blood pressure of 174 over 115 was so concerning at that point, she needed to be admitted and monitored. Most questioned her doctor’s choice not to label her condition as severe. The treatment for severe preeclampsia, which points to a problem with the placenta, is delivery — or, at 20 weeks, an abortion. 

66

Instead, doctors lowered her blood pressure with medication and sent her home. 

Three days later, JJ crawled into bed with his mom and fed her soup. “I’m so sorry,” Walker croaked. “It’s your birthday and it shouldn’t be like this.” 

He told his mom it was okay. He hadn’t expected laser tag or a trip to Dave & Buster’s this year. Over the past few months, when his mom was home, he had tried his best to make things easier on her, walking the dogs when she was out of breath, checking in every hour or so with a hug. JJ knew that after missing so many days of work, she had lost her job. She was stressed about getting enough food for the house. He was relieved when he heard her snoring — at least she was resting.

That afternoon, when his stepdad was out grocery shopping and his grandmother was just getting back from dialysis, he cracked open the door to Walker’s room. 

His mom was lying face-down in bed, as if she had fallen over while getting up. JJ ran over and tried to find any sign she was breathing. When he called 911, a dispatcher coached him to slide her to the rug and start CPR.

“I need you!”

The anti-abortion activists who helped shape America’s latest wave of abortion bans have long seen health exemptions as a loophole that would get in the way of their goals. They fear such exceptions, if included in the laws, would allow virtually anyone to terminate a pregnancy.

In Idaho, an anti-abortion leader testifying at a state Senate hearing suggested doctors would use health exceptions to give abortions to patients with headaches. 

In South Dakota, a pregnant Republican lawmaker with a high risk of blood clots begged her colleagues to consider creating a health exception that would protect her; her bill never made it to a hearing. 

In Tennessee, an anti-abortion lobbyist with no medical training fought and defeated an amendment to the state law that would allow a health exception to “prevent” an emergency. He testified in the state Capitol that the carve-out was too broad since some pregnancy complications “work themselves out.” 

67

The refusal to entertain these broader exceptions is particularly consequential given the state of women’s health. Women are entering pregnancy older and sicker than they have in decades. The rate of blood pressure disorders in pregnancy has more than doubled since 1993; they now affect up to 15% of U.S. pregnancies. And they’re most prevalent in states with restrictive abortion policies, according to a 2023 study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The burden of disease falls heaviest on Black women, like Walker, for an array of reasons: neighborhood disinvestment, poor access to health care and discrimination in the medical system. Cuts to Medicaid funding and changes to the Affordable Care Act are likely to exacerbate these problems, according to experts. 

Other countries give pregnant women and their doctors far more control over the medical decision to terminate. Across Europe, for example, most laws permit abortion for any reason through the first trimester, when more than 90% of abortions occur. After that gestational limit, their statutes also tend to include broad health exceptions that can be used for chronic conditions, illnesses that develop in pregnancy, fetal anomalies and, in some countries, mental health. 

U.S. abortion bans generally restrict interventions to a far more limited set of health risks, like a “life-threatening medical emergency” or “substantial and irreversible” harm to major organs. A small subset of lawyers and doctors argue that the law can and should be interpreted to cover patients with chronic conditions that are worsening in pregnancy. But the vaguely written bans threaten criminal penalties for performing an illegal abortion — in Texas, up to 99 years behind bars. In practice, few hospitals grant health exceptions, ProPublica’s reporting has found.

Dr. Jessica Tarleton, an OB-GYN who provides abortions in South Carolina, recalled how much changed at her hospital when the state’s ban was put in place: OB-GYNs who want to provide an abortion to a patient with a health risk now need to get a maternal-fetal medicine specialist to explicitly write in the chart that it is necessary, in compliance with the law. Not many doctors are willing to do so.

68 

“Some people were not because of their personal beliefs, and some because they didn’t want to be involved in any kind of potential legal actions,” Tarleton said. “They didn’t want their opinion to have anything to do with a patient getting an abortion or not.” 

Recently, for example, Cristina Nuñez sued two hospitals in El Paso for their inaction in her care in 2023. She had diabetes, uncontrolled blood pressure and end-stage kidney disease when she learned she was unexpectedly pregnant at 36. Doctors wrote in her medical record that “she needs termination based on threat to maternal life or health,” but Nuñez alleged that one hospital failed to find an anesthesiologist willing to participate. She remained pregnant for weeks, even as blood clots turned her right arm black, until an advocacy organization threatened legal action and she was able to obtain an abortion. The lawsuit is ongoing. 

This year, Texas Republicans passed legislation with minor amendments to their ban after ProPublica reported the deaths of three miscarrying women who did not receive critical abortion care during emergencies. In the updated law, an emergency still needs to be “life-threatening” to qualify for an abortion, but it no longer needs to be “imminent.” Doctors expect that most hospitals still won’t provide abortions to women like Walker who have dangerous chronic conditions but no certain threat to their lives. 

ProPublica asked Sen. Bryan Hughes, the author of Texas’ abortion ban, about how the specific complications Walker faced should be treated by doctors under the amended law. When her pregnancy began, would she be eligible for an abortion due to her health? Would she need to wait for a diagnosis of severe preeclampsia? Is there a reason the law doesn’t include an exception for health risks? ProPublica put the same questions to the 20 state senators who co-wrote the bipartisan amendment. 

69

Only Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Democrat, responded. In her view, the amendment was far too narrow. But, she said, her Republican colleagues defer to the far right of their base and oppose broader exceptions.

“You can’t proclaim to be pro-life, but you’re passing laws that are endangering women and causing death,” she said. “We have to allow for more exceptions.” 

After Walker died, her family felt bewildered by her medical care. The doctors had assured them that her baby was healthy and she would be fine. The autopsy found that the fetus was indeed healthy, at just under a pound and measuring 9 inches long. But it showed that Walker had hypertensive cardiovascular disease with preeclampsia, along with an enlarged heart, dangerously full of fluid, and kidney damage — signs that her condition had declined even more than she knew. 

In Carson’s mind, the many doctors they saw cast the risks as challenges that would be overcome if his wife followed directions. “She was doing what they told her to do,” he said. He couldn’t understand how no one suggested ending the pregnancy to keep Walker safe. “Nobody said nothing.” 

Latanya worried the law played a role. “They didn’t want to offer to end the pregnancy, because the government or someone says you can’t? So you’d rather let somebody die?” she said. “Now we are the ones that have to suffer.” 

JJ couldn’t bear to stay in the home where he had found his mom, so he moved in with Latanya. Each day, he scrolls through old videos on the computer so he can hear Walker’s voice. 

Latanya does everything she can to support him, but she knows she can’t erase his pain. 

She recalls watching JJ steady himself at Walker’s funeral, to see her one last time. Until that point, he hadn’t cried.

When he finally faced the open casket where his mom lay holding her fetus, JJ sank to his knees, overcome. His aunt, uncles, cousins and grandmother gathered around him and rocked him in their arms.

BBC History Magazine

 70

Under Idaho’s abortion ban, a family confronts life-or-death reality — and a crisis of faith

BY KELSEY TURNER

April 18, 2025 05:00 PM

Desi Ballis didn’t understand why her doctor needed her to go to Utah. 

She lay on an exam table in Boise, her pregnant belly wet with ultrasound gel. At 38, she’d done various genetic tests that confirmed her baby was developing normally. Its small features looked perfect on the screen.

But her baby wasn’t getting enough oxygen. Her 20-week ultrasound in February 2024 showed findings of hydrops fetalis, an often lethal condition where fluid builds up in the fetus’ body, according to Desi’s medical records. Her baby would almost certainly die before delivery. If she remained pregnant, Desi risked dying, too.

She remembers the tears in the ultrasound technician’s eyes as the doctor calmly repeated, “I need you to get to Salt Lake.” 

He had already notified a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Salt Lake City about her case, he told her. That doctor would be in touch soon. 

“I could just tell he wanted to say something and he couldn’t,” Desi said. “It was just such an awful, eerie feeling.”

It wasn’t until later that day, when the Utah doctor called on her drive home, that Desi learned the blunt truth: She might need an abortion to save her own life. And she would have to leave Idaho to get it.

Before that moment, Desi hadn’t reflected much on Idaho’s near-total abortion ban. As a Christian, she knew that some people within her rural community didn’t support elective abortions, but she figured that if a woman really needed one, she could get it.

71

But the Ballises had entered a moment of extreme uncertainty about abortion rights in Idaho. Lawmakers had passed one of the nation’s strictest abortion bans, a trigger law that took effect in August 2022, two months after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed the right to abortion nationwide. Idaho’s ban includes an exception to “prevent the death of the pregnant woman” — but none for preventing severe health consequences that might arise.

Idaho’s near-total ban, like others in states such as Texas and Tennessee, has been caught up in lawsuits claiming that its exception for medical emergencies is too narrow. While the litigation proceeds, emergency abortions remain available for patients at certain hospitals in Idaho. In rare circumstances, Idaho physicians — unclear on how to interpret the law and not wanting to risk a prison sentence or their patients’ health — send pregnant women across state lines for treatment before their conditions become dire.

Desi’s pregnancy took place in a six-month period between January and June 2024 when the U.S. Supreme Court let Idaho’s abortion law go into full effect even in medical emergencies. In that period, Idaho families and doctors were given a preview of what reproductive health care looks like in a state where nearly all abortions are a crime. Within four months, St. Luke’s Health System, which delivers about 40% of the state’s babies, reported that it had to put six different pregnant patients on flights to neighboring states for treatment, a sharp increase from just one in all of 2023. That’s not counting those who drove themselves out of state like Desi.

Doctors, mothers and advocates who have fought to expand Idaho’s medical exception got a partial victory on April 11, when a state judge ruled that abortions are allowed when a pregnant person faces a “non-negligible” risk of dying sooner without one. Reproductive rights advocates celebrated the step forward, though Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador also claimed it as a victory — emphasizing that it doesn’t change Idaho law and reaffirms that the state constitution doesn’t contain a right to abortion.

72

The ruling could enable people like Desi to get care in Idaho, but it’s unclear how it will work in practice or if there will be other legal challenges. And it continues leaving behind many patients whose pregnancy complications don’t threaten their own lives, even if the pregnancy is doomed. 

As doctors are left making critical, time-sensitive decisions about whether they feel safe providing abortions under state law, the Trump administration and the Idaho Attorney General’s Office continue pushing against the limited protections that Idaho providers have when caring for patients who might need emergency abortions. 

“When these states say, ‘Well, there is an exemption for the mother’s life,’ what people don’t understand is that that is in such absolute, extreme conditions,” said Morgan Ballis, Desi’s husband and the sheriff of Blaine County in Central Idaho. “But even in some of those cases, those women get turned away. So it is an absolute lie. It is completely false.”

Prayers, pregnancy and politics

The pregnancy had felt like a miracle. After more than two years of praying and trying without success, Desi and Morgan accepted that they wouldn’t have a third child, they said. A few months later, Desi found out she was expecting.

They wanted their baby’s gender to be a surprise, but Desi had a feeling deep down that it was a boy. They’d even picked out the name: Tucker Finn.

“We had just always said, if it’s a boy, ‘Is this our Tucker?’ ” Desi said. “It was just kind of this unspoken thing.”

They’d heard from friends that it was fun to do the 20-week ultrasound in Boise, where they could see their baby on a big screen. So they made a day of it, driving two and a half hours west from Hailey, the town of about 10,000 people where they’ve lived since 2020, following Morgan’s 11 years in the Marine Corps and a few more years in California. The Ballises quickly found a foothold within the tight-knit central Idaho town, Desi as an educator in Blaine County and Morgan as a school resource officer with the Hailey Police Department.

73

“It’s just this amazing, wonderful community where your friends, your neighbors, everyone becomes like family. Everyone looks out for everyone,” Morgan said.

Blaine County, a haven for outdoor enthusiasts known for its Sun Valley ski resort, is a longstanding Democratic island in a staunchly Republican state. It was one of only two Idaho counties to go blue in the 2024 presidential election, with Democrats representing 30% of the county’s registered voters compared to 12% statewide, according to the Idaho Secretary of State.

Although Desi and Morgan both grew up in Republican families, Desi wasn’t very politically involved, she said. Her Christian faith, not politics, formed the backbone of her values. But she never had a hard line on abortion. 

“I’ve always just felt that as a Christian, my only job is to love on others,” Desi said. “God gave us free will, and God gave us the ability to choose, and my belief system doesn’t get to take away that choice of someone else.”

Morgan said that if he’d had to describe himself as “pro-life” or “pro-choice” before 2024, he likely would’ve landed on “pro-life.” He understood abortion as a decision that people make voluntarily. 

“I didn’t know anything about all the medical nuances,” he said. “The honest answer is, I was just ignorant.” 

74

When Desi got the call from the Utah doctor that February day in Boise, they didn’t have time to reflect on the word “abortion.” Everything became a mad dash to get to Salt Lake City as soon as possible. How would they get the kids to school? Could they both get time off work? Find a hotel? Pay for medical expenses and gas to cover the 10-hour round trip drive?

The next morning, Morgan’s dad was on his way from Arizona to watch the kids and Desi’s suitcase was packed. 

Desi and Morgan left Hailey in Morgan’s pickup truck around 8 a.m., they said. They didn’t know what the doctors in Utah would tell them, but they knew that their baby was dying and they were running out of time. A few minutes into the drive, Morgan pulled over for coffee and took out an envelope that they’d gotten at the ultrasound the day before. The baby’s gender was folded inside. 

They hadn’t planned on touching the envelope. But now, Morgan told Desi that he had to know. He wanted to call his child by name, to know who they were praying for. They looked at the paper together, confirming what Desi already felt deep in her heart.

“It’s Tucker,” she said.

Morgan felt struck by a wave of anger.

“Essentially, everyone in the house wanted a little brother,” he said.

He remembers getting out of the truck and punching the cover on his truck bed. Then he returned to the driver’s seat, wiped away his tears and got back on the road. 

Salt Lake

On the same day that the Ballises fled to Utah, the Idaho Attorney General’s Office took the Biden administration to the Supreme Court. The office asked the court to stop the federal government from overriding its abortion ban, arguing that Idaho law is consistent with federal requirements to provide stabilizing treatment for patients in medical emergencies.

“My office has been equally clear in all our filings in court: if a doctor believes in good faith that the termination of a woman’s pregnancy is necessary to save her life — regardless of how imminent that risk is — Idaho law allows it,” Attorney General Labrador wrote in an opinion article for the Idaho Statesman last year.

Idaho obstetrician gynecologists, however, have described instances where patients’ pregnancy complications could have led to kidney failure, stroke, sepsis, heart failure and other grave conditions if left untreated. 

75

“In some cases, these conditions can and do cause death,” wrote Stacy Seyb, an Idaho OB-GYN and maternal-fetal medicine specialist, in a declaration to federal court. “And often, it will simply not be possible for a physician to determine whether termination is necessary to prevent her death as opposed to some severe harm to the patient short of death.”

Still, the Idaho Attorney General’s Office continued asserting that both state and federal law share the same goal: to save lives.

“The reality is that our law is very clear. It protects doctors, it protects women, it protects unborn children,” Labrador said in a press conference after a Supreme Court hearing in April 2024. “It’s really hard for me to conceive of a single instance where a woman has to be airlifted out of Idaho to perform an abortion.”

After four hours of driving through mountain passes and farmland, Desi and Morgan arrived at the hospital in Salt Lake City. A team of doctors met them in the lobby and performed another myriad of tests, they said. 

In Desi’s case, the complications were caused by parvovirus B19, her medical records show, an infection that she’d likely contracted during her work with children. The virus is usually harmless, even in pregnancy, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — but in rare cases like Desi’s, it can lead to severe fetal anemia. If she remained pregnant, she ran the risk of developing mirror syndrome, a potentially life-threatening condition where a pregnant person’s symptoms mirror those of the fetus.

Abortion was the medical treatment that she needed. The doctor cautioned that if they returned home without terminating the pregnancy, they would likely end up right back in Utah anyway, possibly in an emergency flight, Desi recalled. 

Desi felt like she didn’t have a choice. “It was, die with your son or don’t die,” she said. 

Then the doctor delivered more bad news: Neither of their employer-sponsored health insurance plans would cover the hospital stay. Idaho law prohibits most private and public insurance plans from covering abortions. Their insurance with the Department of Veterans Affairs — which Desi gets through Morgan, a combat veteran who’s permanently disabled from his service — didn’t cover it either, as that plan only pays for abortions in certain specific circumstances.

76

“We were quoted $25,000 to $35,000 just for the hospital stay. That wasn’t the procedure, that wasn’t anesthesia, that wasn’t anything else,” Desi said. “I just remember panicking because I was like, ‘Where am I supposed to go?’ ”

It wasn’t until the next afternoon, a Wednesday, that they finally found a clinic that would take them. The cost would be covered through a local abortion fund, an independent organization that provides financial and logistical support for people seeking abortions. But the clinic couldn’t even see them for an initial appointment for another 24 hours, Desi said. The procedure wouldn’t happen until Friday. 

That’s when Desi, confronted with the loss of her son and possibly her own life, felt the bedrock of her faith begin to crumble. 

“That was kind of the first time that I was thinking, ‘God, where are you in this?’ ” she said. “Why would you make me wait so long to get pregnant, make me feel convinced that I wasn’t going to get pregnant, and then let me get pregnant, and then have this happen to me?”

As she prayed for a miracle, Morgan prayed for direction. “God, give us something to let us know this is the right thing to do,” he said. Amid his prayers, he had a sudden realization that they weren’t alone.

“As clear as day, I can still remember it, God spoke to me and said, ‘Who knows better the pain of losing a son than God himself?’ ” Morgan said. “I was overwhelmed with a sense of peace that this is gonna be OK.”

That Friday, Desi — hundreds of miles from home, with her dying son still inside her — got an abortion.

‘Dying enough’

Among rapidly changing abortion laws and legal decisions throughout the country, Idaho patients’ access to medically necessary abortions continues to hang in the balance.

77

In September 2023, the Center for Reproductive Rights, a global legal advocacy organization, filed a lawsuit against the state of Idaho intending to broaden Idaho’s medical exceptions. Like Desi, the four Idaho mothers who brought the case had to travel out of state for abortion care after receiving diagnoses of severe and fatal fetal conditions that put their own health at risk. Also like Desi, each woman took a financial hit, racking up costs for hotels, gas, flights and procedures not covered by insurance. Desi’s trip to Utah cost her family at least $3,000 between the hotel, child care, travel costs and sending Tucker’s remains back to Idaho, her records show.

On April 11, an Idaho judge ruled on the case, finding that abortions can be performed under state law if the pregnant person’s life is at risk, even if her death isn’t imminent or assured. The ruling, while a step forward for reproductive rights advocates, continues to exclude many people in need of abortion care, including some of the mothers who brought the case, according to the center.

“It remains to be seen if this is going to provide additional reassurance or additional access to abortion care because there still remains a significant amount of gray area,” said Misa Perron-Burdick, an OB-GYN at St. Luke’s, Idaho’s largest health system. “It’s really hard to determine if a patient faces an increased risk of dying.” 

As health care providers navigate these changes, a similar case is awaiting a decision in federal court. On March 5, the Trump administration dropped a lawsuit arguing that Idaho’s ban conflicts with the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a federal law requiring Medicare-funded hospitals to provide emergency care. The suit was initially filed by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Biden administration.

78

Physicians, attorneys and judges have argued that in some cases, abortion is the treatment needed to stabilize a pregnant patient under this federal law. Idaho Attorney General Labrador has countered that “the notion that EMTALA requires doctors to perform abortions is absurd.”

When InvestigateWest reached out to the Idaho Attorney General’s Office, the office stood by its previous statements, arguing that there is “no conflict” between Idaho’s abortion law and federal emergency care requirements.

In anticipation of the Trump administration’s actions, St. Luke’s filed its own lawsuit against Labrador in January. A court order granted in March means that, at least for now, St. Luke’s can continue performing emergency abortions to stabilize pregnant patients.

Yet even with these protections in place, many patients will likely still need to go out of state for abortion care, Perron-Burdick said. 

“The laws are confusing, and everybody is really scared,” she said. “So even if I as a provider feel comfortable providing care for a patient, does the pharmacist feel comfortable dispensing the medication? Does the anesthesia provider feel comfortable providing anesthesia? Does the nurse feel comfortable administering the medication?”

Sending pregnant patients out of Idaho can feel risky for doctors, too. Although state law doesn’t explicitly prohibit doctors from referring patients to other states for abortions, Labrador sent a letter to a Republican state representative in March 2023 claiming that it did. A federal appeals court later rejected Labrador’s interpretation of the statute, finding that prosecuting doctors for out-of-state abortion referrals violates their right to free speech.

“That letter from the attorney general just struck fear into the medical professions,” Morgan said. “Our doctor in Boise was never able to clearly state what the likely possible outcome was. He never used the word ‘abortion’ as even an option or consideration.”

Desi’s Idaho providers, through Desi, declined to talk to InvestigateWest about her case, referencing an ongoing legal battle in Indiana that could force the Indiana Department of Health to release terminated pregnancy reports to the public. The Indiana case — as well as recent criminal charges against medical providers under abortion laws in Texas and Louisiana — have continued to raise questions about how patients’ medical records can be used to incriminate doctors. 

79

“The reality is, there is no amount of legislation that can legislate every medical nuance,” Desi said. “Who gets to make that call? Who’s to say that I wasn’t dying enough?”

Honoring Tucker

While partisan battles over abortion play out across the country, often pitting liberal reproductive rights advocates against a conservative, faith-based opposition, families like the Ballises are living a much more complex reality. 

After returning from Utah, Morgan felt called to run for Blaine County sheriff, his faith only strengthened by his loss of Tucker. A military veteran, Christian and law enforcement officer, Morgan had been a Republican nearly his whole life.

When he launched his campaign, he ran as a Democrat.

“After having to get an abortion, what it came down to for me was, the party that I had supported my entire life was the party that put us into this situation,” Morgan said. “What I saw was my faith being weaponized to put these laws in place.”

He won the November election in a landslide.

Desi also became more politically involved, advocating for women’s right to make their own medical decisions. She feels a responsibility to tell people about her experience to honor Tucker, she said.

“The need for life saving health care doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care if you are an atheist, a Christian, or where your political leaning lies,” Desi said.

When the couple began sharing their abortion story within their church community and through an Idaho nonprofit called the Pro-Voice Project, they weren’t sure how it would be received by their more conservative neighbors and friends. For some Idaho Christians, state law still doesn’t go far enough to protect the unborn. State Sen. Brandon Shippy, who describes himself as a Christian and a “true Idaho Republican,” introduced a bill in February that would allow women who get abortions to be prosecuted for murder, without exceptions for rape or incest. The bill, which didn’t move out of committee, gained over a dozen legislative co-sponsors. 

But when the Ballises shared Tucker’s story, the response was “overwhelmingly positive and loving and caring,” Desi said. Women in their community have confided in her about their own abortion stories and thanked her for speaking out.

“That’s what’s been so eye-opening, even in my Christian community,” she said. “Having these conversations and having people say, ‘Whoa, you’re right. It’s not black and white.’ ”

InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reporter Kelsey Turner can be reached at 503-893-2501 and kelsey@investigate.org.

                                                                                          80

Woman’s arrest after miscarriage in Georgia draws fear and anger

Experts say the arrest is part of a pattern of criminalizing pregnancy that’s accelerated since the fall of Roe v. Wade

by Bracey Harris | NBC NEWS Apr. 5, 2025, 7:00 AM EDT

On March 20 in rural Georgia, an ambulance responded to an early morning 911 call about an unconscious, bleeding woman at an apartment. When first responders arrived, they determined that she’d had a miscarriage. That was only the start of her ordeal.

Selena Maria Chandler-Scott was transported to a local hospital, but a witness reported that Scott had placed the fetal remains in a dumpster. When police investigated, they recovered the remains, and Scott was charged with concealing the death of another person and abandoning a dead body. The charges were ultimately dropped; an autopsy determined she‘d had a “natural miscarriage“ at around 19 weeks and the fetus was non-viable.

Still, Scott’s arrest comes at a time when a growing number of women are facing pregnancy-related prosecutions in which the fetus is treated as a person with legal rights. And her experience raises troubling questions about miscarriages that happen in states with strict abortion laws, women’s health advocates say. How should remains be disposed of? And who gets to decide?

Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, the Living Infants Fairness and Equality (LIFE) Act, provides any fetus with a heartbeat legal recognition under the law.

Though the push for “fetal personhood” provisions like this one predates the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, experts say it has intensified since.

Roughly two dozen personhood bills have been introduced in the first three months of this year, according to the Guttmacher Insitute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.

Jill Wieber Lens, a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law and expert on stillbirth and pregnancy loss, sees wider implications in Chandler-Scott's arrest. Research shows that 10-20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, most often in the first trimester.

81

“If what comes out of you in a miscarriage is a dead human body, and you can’t abandon that, you can’t put that in the trash, you can’t flush it down the toilet,” Lens said, “most people experiencing miscarriage are also apparently committing crimes in Georgia.”

Legal experts have drawn comparisons between Chandler-Scott’s arrest and that of Brittany Watts, a then 34-year-old woman in Warren, Ohio, who was charged with abuse of a corpse after her miscarriage in 2023, though the charges were later dropped.

In January, she filed a lawsuit against the city and hospital where she sought care. Neither the hospital nor the police responded to requests for comment, but the hospital filed a response in court, denying wrongdoing. The case is still pending.

In an interview last year, Watts said she feared a similar arrest could happen again. “As the old saying goes, ‘History repeats itself,’” Watts said. “I don’t want it to happen in this case.”

Advocates say the number of pregnant people facing criminal charges for conduct linked to pregnancy rose after Dobbs. At least 210 women were charged in the year that followed, according to a 2024 report from Pregnancy Justice, a reproductive rights group.

Women of color, lower-income women and women struggling with substance use are particularly vulnerable in interactions with authorities, advocates say.

82

Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, said she was glad to hear the charges against Chandler-Scott were dropped. “On the one hand, this is terrific news,” she said. But “it doesn’t undo the very real harm and devastation charges like these bring in the first place.”

Chandler-Scott’s arrest is just one example of how Georgia is harming women's health and lives, said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based reproductive justice organization that has challenged the state's abortion ban in court. Last year, Amber Thurman died after she reportedly had to wait nearly a day for surgery that experts said could have saved her life.

“The picture that’s being painted in Georgia is a very grim one,” Simpson said. “Georgians are not asking for more restrictions, or more surveillance. We’re actually asking to have more health care, to have more access.”

Georgia recently held a hearing on a personhood bill that would have allowed people who end their pregnancies to be charged with murder. “We have turned Roe vs. Wade around. Let’s go ahead and just bring back life to the unborn,” Rep. Emory Dunahoo, a Republican, told an NBC affiliate. The bill died this week without a vote.

Sally Harrell, a Democratic state Senator from Atlanta, spoke publiclyfrom the state capitol this week about Chandler-Scott’s arrest.

“This case demonstrates the idiocy of fetal personhood,” she said, adding, “This is terrifying for women of reproductive age in Georgia.”

The Tift County district attorney’s office, which handled Chandler-Scott’s case, did not answer a list of detailed questions about it from NBC News and referred instead to a press release about the charges being dismissed.

In that release, District Attorney Patrick Warren said his office had determined that the fetus had not been born alive and pursuing the case against Chandler-Scott was “not in the interest of justice.”

The office referred additional questions about the case to the police department, which did not respond.

83

A person answering a contact listed for Chandler-Scott said it was not her number. A relative did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“In these sensitive moments of her life, it has caused not only her but her family emotional, financial and mental stress,” an online fundraiser for Chandler-Scott states.

Warren acknowledged in his press release that some in the community might be unhappy with his decision to drop the charges.

“This case is heartbreaking and emotionally difficult for everyone involved,” he said, “but our decision must be grounded in law — not emotion or speculation.”

Wall Street Journal 

Return to Top of Page

Return to Home