"It was a waiting game, the most horrific version of a staring contest," wrote Texas woman Amanda Zurawski this week on the feminist website The Meteor. "Whose life would end first? Mine, or my daughter's?"
Zurawski's tale of a tragic, "inevitable" miscarriage, followed by a seemingly legally compelled denial of medical care, is likely to become more and more common in states with strict abortion bans. Whether these vaguely written laws would actually be used against a doctor who performed an abortion to save a woman's life is unclear. But it seems that in states where abortion is banned, cautious physicians often delay abortions even when that delay places a woman's life in danger. As long as anti-abortion laws remain vague regarding medically necessary abortions, the lives of women like Zurawski will continue to hang in the balance.
