WASHINGTON — Two Texas women whose doctors refused to perform legal and medically urgent abortions met Tuesday with first lady Jill Biden, recounting their ordeals as the White House pressures Congress to codify rights the Supreme Court erased nearly a year ago.
“Even prayed-for, planned pregnancies can end in abortion,” said one of the women, Austin Dennard, a Dallas physician with two kids and a third due in August. “The state of Texas should not be making these decisions for me or for anybody else.”
The first lady listened intently, as part of a blitz intended to ramp up pressure on lawmakers — and assure Democratic voters that abortion rights remain top of mind for the president.
Dennard fought back tears as she told Biden about the “demeaning” experience she endured after a routine ultrasound showed the brain and skull of her fetus had not developed.
As an obstetrician/gynecologist and a professor at UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, Dennard knew full well the prognosis from anencephaly: Fetuses with such a severe defect have no chance of survival beyond a few days. Often they’re stillborn.
Keeping the pregnancy any longer only put herself at risk, “but in the eyes of my state, it was my only option,” Dennard said.
Saturday marks one year since the Supreme Court struck down Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 landmark that stemmed from a decades-old Texas ban on abortion.
Jill Biden noted that 18 states now ban abortion, something they couldn’t have done during the Roe era.
Women are being “turned away from emergency rooms” or denied medication for arthritis and cancer “even when they aren’t pregnant,” the first lady said, seated with the women in the ceremonial Blue Room. “Survivors of rape and incest are being forced to travel across state lines for care. Doctors have stopped providing the care that they know is best for their patients because they don’t know which procedures are legal.”
“The Dobbs decision was devastating. And Joe is doing everything he can do to fight back,” the first lady said. “But the only way that we can ensure that every woman has the fundamental freedoms that she deserves is for Congress to make the protections of Roe v. Wade the law of the land once again.”
In Dallas, Vice President Kamala Harris taped a special edition of MSNBC’s The ReidOut on Tuesday to further amplify the administration’s pushback against Dobbs.
At the White House, the first lady heard from another Texan, Elizabeth Weller of Houston. She was 19 weeks pregnant when her water broke. It was her first pregnancy.
Dobbs was still five weeks away, but Texas had already banned abortion at six weeks. Even with no hope of survival, no fetal heartbeat and a big risk of maternal infection, the hospital she went to refused to risk legal repercussions.
“It was heartbreaking and terrifying,” Weller said. “My baby would not survive” but to the state, “my life didn’t matter.”
“If we allow this to continue, women will die, if they haven’t already,” she said.
A Florida woman told the first lady of her similar experience.
Anya Cook’s membranes broke at 15 weeks. The fetus had no more than a day or two, but doctors refused to perform an abortion despite the high risk to Cook and the fact that termination is the standard of care in such situations.
As she awaited the inevitable miscarriage, and fearing she might not survive it, Cook went to get her hair done so her mom wouldn’t have to, in case she had to be buried.
“That’s why my daughter was stillborn in the bathroom of a beauty salon,” Cook said. “I was hemorrhaging so much blood that I passed out.”
At the emergency room, her husband had to beg the doctors not to perform an emergency hysterectomy that would have made her unable to have children. She isn’t yet sure if she can get pregnant again, let alone carry to term.
“All because politicians who are not doctors had interfered with … very personal and private life decisions,” she said. “Someone needs to fight back against these insidious laws in states across the country.”
Nancy Davis, a mother of three from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was 10 weeks pregnant when she learned that her fetus had anencephaly, also called acrania. She ended up going 1,400 miles to New York to get an abortion because doctors in Louisiana feared prosecution or losing their medical license.
“I was being forced to carry my baby,” she said.
Dennard had already had a miscarriage and aborted another fetus that would not have survived.
“I remember looking at the ultrasound screen and just knowing immediately that I was going to need another abortion,” Dennard said. But “this time, I would have to flee my own state in order to receive one.”
Her husband is also a physician. Months before the Dobbs ruling, the state put a ruinous legal bounty on doctors who help women obtain an abortion after six weeks. Dennard was 11 weeks pregnant.
The couple worried that using a credit card to travel to the East Coast would leave an evidence trail that could bog them down in litigation or cost them their right to practice medicine.
“It was completely humiliating,” Dennard said. “I felt physically and emotionally broken, especially coming so soon after my previous miscarriage. Texas’ new abortion laws were written by politicians, not by doctors. And now physicians like me, and patients like me, can’t even discuss the safest options for their bodies and future families without fear.”
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