-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Over the last week, 31-year-old Taylor Edwards has had a lot to process emotionally. Since becoming a plaintiff in Zurawski v. State of Texas , a landmark case that sought to clarify a confusing exception to the state’s abortion laws, she has repeatedly had to relive the worst day of her life.
Her story began when she and her husband happily learned she was pregnant in November 2022 after two years of in vitro fertilization. But at 17 weeks of gestation, the couple found out devastating news at an anatomy scan: her fetus had a fatal condition called encephalocele and would die at or before birth. It causes a sac-like protrusion of brain tissue coming out of an opening in the skull and impacts about 1 in 10,000 babies born in the U.
S. After a confirmed diagnosis, she was told by her doctors that they couldn’t help her if she wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Edwards found a clinic in New Mexico , but three hours before her flight, the clinic canceled due to a shortage of medication needed for the procedure.
Taylor was eventually able to obtain an abortion at a Colorado clinic two weeks later. But during those two weeks, she started to get sick and vomit daily. Still, Edwards was unable to access abortion care in Texas because she wasn’t imminently dying.
Related Republicans want a database of pregnant people. In many ways, abortion surveillance is already here The experience has had lasting effects emotionally and physically. “A.
