Alan Peaceman, a professor of maternal-fetal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. The result has been disarray and confusion for doctors and hospitals in multiple states, and risky delays and complications for patients facing obstetric conditions such as ectopic pregnancies, incomplete miscarriages, placental problems, and premature rupture of membranes. Many offer no exemptions for rape, incest, or fetal anomalies.īut the most confusing development involves the exemptions that exist for the woman’s life or health, or because of a “medical emergency.” These terms are left vague or undefined. The new abortion bans - or the old laws being resurrected in a post-Roe world - are rigidly written and untested in the courts. The crisis the Wellers endured is emblematic of the vast and perhaps unintended medical impacts of the criminalization of abortion in Republican-led states. Another ban, a so-called “trigger law” passed by Texas in 2021, is expected to go into effect within weeks. Today, abortion is also illegal in Texas under a 1925 law that the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, declared to be in effect after Roe v. Since then, thousands of women have left Texas to obtain abortions in other states. That’s when a new state law banned all abortions after embryonic or fetal cardiac activity is detected - usually at about six weeks of pregnancy. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling.īut the Wellers and 28 million other Texans had already been living under a de facto abortion ban for eight months, since September 2021. Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion in its Dobbs v. Greg Abbott, who signed it and on the inflamed political rhetoric, which Elizabeth said sees abortion “as one thing, a black-and-white issue, when abortion has all of these gray areas.” State abortion laws are complicating other types of obstetric careĮlizabeth’s pregnancy crisis began - and ended - weeks before June 24, when the U.S. Her waters had broken, launching her into what she called a “dystopian nightmare” of “physical, emotional and mental anguish.” She places the blame for the ensuing medical trauma on the Republican legislators who passed the state’s anti-abortion law on Texas Gov. And I screamed because that’s when I knew something wrong was happening.” That’s when she felt something “shift” in her uterus, down low, and then “this burst of water just falls out of my body. Down in the kitchen, images from recent scans and ultrasounds were stuck to the fridge.Įlizabeth stood up to get some lunch. In the nursery upstairs, they had stashed some baby clothes and new cans of paint. She ate a healthy breakfast, went for a walk outside, and came back home. There they found themselves pinned down, clinically and emotionally, victims of a collision between standard obstetric practice and the rigid new demands of Texas law. I had not been put in the crossroads of this issue.”īut in early May, not long after the uneventful anatomy scan, the Wellers suddenly arrived at that crossroads. And at this particular point in her life, pregnant for the first time at age 26, it was still somewhat abstract: “I had not been put in a position to where I had to weigh the real nuances that went into this situation.