Lauren Miller was pregnant with twins when she landed in the emergency room after 36 straight hours of vomiting. An ultrasound would reveal that one of her expected twins had fluid where the brain should be developing.
"After speaking with multiple doctors and genetic counselors, we kept arriving at the same point: our son would die," Miller recalled during a press call organized by the Democratic Party on Monday. She could die too too, her doctors said, which would in turn kill the viable fetus and leave her toddler at home without a mother.
The course of treatment was obvious: Miller needed an abortion. Before the summer of 2022, that wouldn't have been much of a problem, even in her home state of Texas, as there was a federally recognized constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. After the Supreme Court's conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade, however, more than a dozen states imposed strict bans on the procedure. And while Texas, like other states, has exceptions to protect the life of a mother, in practice there is a concern that recommending one could result in a medical professional being liable for what the state GOP argues is an act of murder.
"As my medical providers tried to counsel me on my options," Miller said, "they would just stop mid-sentence, looking for the right words. It was like they were afraid that they would be arrested just for saying the word 'abortion' out loud."
One specialist, Miller recalled, was visibly upset, tearing off his gloves and angrily tossing them in the trash. "I can't help you anymore," he said. "You need to leave the state."
Miller was finally able to terminate the pregnancy when she heeded the specialist's advice and left the Lone Star state.
"I was at risk of organ damage to my kidneys and brain, but I wasn't dead enough for an abortion in Texas, " Miller said.
Texas Republicans imposed a near-total ban on abortion following the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision, a move that has been followed by complaints, from pregnant people and their doctors, that the prohibition is unclear on when a pregnancy can be terminated to protect a life.
Last week, the state's all-Republican Supreme Court rejected a legal challenge from women who said their lives were endangered as a result of complicated pregnancies that their doctors were hesitant to properly treat; the court said abortions could go ahead based on the "good faith judgment" of a medical professional that an individual would be "unlikely to survive."
But what if a doctor performs an abortion that a court later decides wasn't absolutely necessary? Under current state law, that could mean a sentence of life in prison. Some Republicans want to go even further than that.
As writer Jessica Valenti noted, the Texas Republican Party has adopted a plank that effectively calls for people who perform or obtain abortions to be prosecuted and potentially sentenced to death. The party's platform urges lawmakers "to enact legislation to abolish abortion by immediately securing the right to life and equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization." That language was first added in 2022, Valenti reported, "after a lobbying effort by Abolish Abortion Texas," a group that refers to "preborn babies" as being "murdered," the punishment for which includes capital punishment.
"The fact that this platform could even be brought up for a vote is disturbing," Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, told reporters on Monday. "But it should remind us how extreme and out of touch Donald Trump's MAGA Republican Party has become. If we allow Trump to get to the White House, he will subject all women across this country to his agenda of revenge and retribution."
While boasting of his responsibility for state abortion bans, Trump, who appointed three of the six justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and previously endorsed punishing doctors who perform abortions and patients who receive them, has waffled on just how far he would go if he wins in November. Last month, the presumptive Republican nominee told an interviewer he was "looking at" allowing state bans on birth control, only to walk back the statement after criticism.
Miller, who ultimately received a single fetal abortion and give birth to a healthy son, said she's not confused about the former president's positions when it comes to women and reproductive rights. Trump won't make America great, she said, but he will make it more like Texas, subjecting millions more Americans to the sort of abortion restrictions that now cover a third of the U.S. population.
Should he win in November, according to Miller, "he will make this nightmare a reality nationwide."
