IIn August 2022, Amanda and Josh Zurawski were 18 weeks into a coveted pregnancy with their first child when her waters broke prematurely. The complication ended her chances of delivering a healthy baby and put her health at risk — but doctors in Austin, where the couple live, said they could not terminate her pregnancy under Texas law because they could still detect the fetus’s heart activity.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022, which overturned half a century of precedent and overturned Roe v Wade, the Texas Legislature, like those in 13 other states , passed a near-total abortion ban. . Although the ban allowed for medical exemptions, doctors have said that the law — written by politicians, not medical professionals — is so vaguely worded, and the criminal penalties so harsh (up to 99 years in prison for violating state abortion laws), that this was unworkable in practice, meaning that doctors could not help patients.
So, against her wishes and the usual standard of care, Zurawski remained pregnant, knowing that her daughter had no chance of survival as she became sicker and sicker. While testifying before the state in a lawsuit that bears her name — the first post-Roe v Wade brought by women who said their health, lives or fertility had been endangered by abortion bans, and the subject of a new documentary director produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence – she listened to the heart activity with a terrible mix of love, for the child she and Josh so desperately wanted, and fear for her deteriorating health. Doctors eventually performed an emergency induction abortion, but only after she developed sepsis and nearly died. The infection kept her in intensive care for days and cost her one of her fallopian tubes, permanently jeopardizing her future ability to have children.
Aided by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Zurawski has taken the state of Texas to court, seeking clarity in the written law, and accountability for a policy that has led to a 13% increase in infant mortality, forced doctors to provide substandard care and has caused incalculable damage. trauma in women seeking primary health care.
“Someone had to file the first charges,” Zurawski says in the film of the same name her lawsuitZurawski v. Texas, released just before a crucial election in which reproductive rights are at stake across the country.
“What we’re asking for in this lawsuit is the bare minimum that human decency requires,” Molly Duane, the Center’s lead attorney for the lawsuit, says in the film. “People are dying. And the question is, does anyone in the state of Texas in a position of power actually care?”
Directed by Texas-born filmmakers Abbie Perrault and Maisie Crow, the film captures with journalistic clarity the chaos, uncertainty and unnecessary pain and suffering that arise when a state bans abortion – what happens in the courtroom, in hospitals and in the private sphere. aftermath. It’s a specific part of post-Roo America: life-saving or simply dignified health care denied due to legal uncertainty to women who wanted to get pregnant in the first place.
“It’s like we’re in triage mode,” Crow told the Guardian. “If someone has to undergo septic treatment before he or she can get an abortion, it means that everyone else who needs an abortion for all the reasons women seek abortion care will not get that care either. We really felt like we needed to highlight the most dire situation unfolding before us, to emphasize that if the women in this lawsuit don’t get care, no one else will.”
And the situation, as the filmmakers discovered, was dire. As soon as Zurawski filed her suit, dozens of women, along with their partners and families, came forward with similarly harrowing stories. In a collage of voicemails that play during the film, others share similar experiences: an ectopic pregnancy where she was denied care until her fallopian tube ruptured, and another unviable pregnancy that was carried to term. Share my story, tell people what’s happening. “The state absolutely wants to sweep their experiences under the rug,” Duane said. “They just want to pretend that real people don’t exist at all.”
Zurawski v Texas follows three of the eventual 22 plaintiffs, who gave personal testimony about their abortion stories, something that happened in court before the for the first time since the 1970s. Samantha Casiano, who lived with her partner and their children in East Texas, discovered during her 20-week scan that her daughter, Halo, would be born without most of her brain – a defect called anencephaly, which was incompatible with life. Unable to afford to travel abroad for an abortion, she was forced to carry out the pregnancy while preparing her daughter’s funeral, then watch Halo for four hours after the birth gasped. Dr. Austin Dennard, a gynecologist based in Dallas, also discovered that her long-awaited third child had anencephaly and had to travel out of state for the medical care she could provide to her patients in her home community. “The fact that these laws are crippling our ability to provide care – it feels like a slap in the face,” she says. Zurawski, traumatized by her medical experience, resorts to surrogacy in another state.
The film is partly behind the scenes of their court hearing – nerves, anger, pride, unspeakable pain (Casiano, narrating Halo’s short life after birth, vomited on the stand) – and partly documentation of trauma, healing and action. “We didn’t want to politicize it because this is a health care issue that has been politicized, but it should be a nonpartisan issue,” Perrault said. “We really just wanted to present what happens to people under these laws and let the audience experience that on a very human, intimate, personal level from each of these women.”
For the participants – Zurawski, Dennard, Casiano, along with their partners and families – “the horror of what they had to experience and its impact on their families and their own reproductive journeys was evident throughout the filmmaking process,” says Kraai. “But we were also incredibly impressed by their courage and willingness to stand up for women across the country by filing this lawsuit and taking the stand to share their testimony.”
In the end, the state did not listen to them. On May 31, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected women’s legal challenge, declaring that the state’s abortion ban could remain as is, without clarifying when medically necessary abortions can be performed. The decision barely mentioned the women. “To know that people in a position of power think pregnant individuals should just be vessels,” Dennard says in the film. “We just have to keep fighting, and we have to keep talking about it, and we have to keep telling our stories, without fear.” To do just that, the film will be released directly for home viewing, as an explicitly urgent call to understand the stakes of abortion bans that many who do not experience them firsthand do not understand. “Twenty-five million women in America live under these kinds of bans,” Perrault said. “It’s not just these women, it’s their partners and their children and their parents. Understanding that this problem can affect you throughout your lifetime is critical.”
The landscape for reproductive rights laid out in Zurawski v. Texas is stunningly bleak, even as similar lawsuits in other four states with near-total abortion bans, including Idaho and Tennessee, remain in legal limbo. But Duane, along with Perrault and Crow, see strength in what they saw during the trial: people — like Zurawski’s conservative family members — changing their minds and their voices by listening to the women’s experiences.
“What we’re seeing now that we didn’t see before Dobbs is families talking about this,” Crow said. “It will take a long time before abortion is accessible again. But in the pre-Dobbs era, abortion was not accessible to so many people who already needed it. If there is a restructuring of the way abortion becomes more accessible, I think that is something to be hopeful about.”