Emotional testimonies from women and doctors continued into the second day of court hearings on the confusion surrounding exceptions under Texas’s restrictive abortion ban.
On Thursday, Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN doctor herself, delivered a tearful testimony as she recounted her experiences of being forced to travel out of state for an abortion due to a nonviable pregnancy.
Eleven weeks into the pregnancy last year, Dennard, who is pregnant again, learned that her baby had anencephaly, a rare and fatal condition affecting the development of the brain and can also pose a serious health risk to the mother. Explaining the condition, Dennard said that babies “survive seconds, minutes … maybe a day. They essentially struggle for air until they pass away.”
Due to a cardiac heartbeat, Dennard was unable to obtain an abortion in Texas and thus had to look elsewhere for an abortion.
“I felt like my pregnancy was not my own, that it belonged to the state, because I no longer had a choice of what I could do. I felt abandoned. I couldn’t believe that after spending my entire life in the state, being a sixth generation Texan, practicing medicine in the state, that the state had completely turned their back on me,” Dennard said.
She went on to describe her experience of obtaining an abortion out of state, which she described as “very safe” and “lasted no more than 10 minutes”.
“I was able to walk out of that clinic and get on an airplane and come home, which I feel very lucky for, but emotionally, the … recovery is quite longer. As I’m sure everyone can tell from listening to the plaintiffs, that grief really never goes away,” Dennard testified as she wept.
Upon being asked whether she considered going public with her story earlier, Dennard said: “I did. At first, my husband and I thought about it.” However, she later decided against it out of “fear that our professional careers … and that the safety of my family could be compromised.
“Frankly, I think so soon after the abortion, I was in a very fragile state, more fragile than I am now, and I don’t think I was ready to risk putting myself out there for fear that some really bad things could happen as a repercussion.”
Nevertheless, Dennard explained her ultimate decision to join more than a dozen women in the lawsuit filed on behalf of them by the Center for Reproductive Rights against the state. The lawsuit, which does not seek to repeal Texas’s highly restrictive abortion laws, is seeking clarification on which situations fall under the “medical emergency” exception in Texas’s abortion bans.
“Joining this lawsuit, I feel, has been a wonderfully productive way to try to make change for the women in Texas so that we can help each other regain the rights that we deserve for our bodies,” said Dennard.
Dennard’s appearance follows testimonies from three other women on Wednesday who each described their own harrowing experiences of being denied abortions in the state despite their life-threatening pregnancies.
In another testimony on Thursday, Ali Raja, an emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts general hospital, described the confusing language surrounding exceptions under Texas’s abortion bans.
“My opinion is that the laws as they’re currently written – the medical exceptions – they’re confusing and that confusion and lack of clarity is keeping physicians from being able to exercise their good faith judgment in the treatment of patients,” Raja said.
“It … is pretty evident that the fact is that the consequences of those laws are severe personally to the physicians themselves. And as a consequence of that … in patients where there is a gray zone and there’s a lack of clarity, they are going to err on the side of not treating,” he added.
Following Thursday’s hearing, one of CRR’s attorneys, Nick Kabat, told the Guardian “there wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom” during the harrowing testimonies.
“What this … demonstrated is that Texas’s abortion bans are harming women across the state. The state [is] trying to tie [doctors’] hands and stop them from providing the care that they were trained to do,” Kabat added.
“The fight has begun and we want people to be aware that these things are happening and we’re not going to shut up about it until something is done about it,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian, Angela Vasquez-Giroux, vice-president of communications and research at Naral Pro-Choice America, one of the country’s largest reproductive rights organizations, said that to her, the biggest takeaway is that “none of this had to happen”.
“Every single thing that every one of these women in the lawsuit and testifying these last few days have experienced and told us about – it’s a direct result of the policies that were written and passed and are now being enforced by Republicans in Texas. These are also the blueprint for the horrific laws that we’re seeing passed and being enforced around the country,” Vasquez-Giroux said.
“It’s cruel, it’s inhumane and it’s state-sanctioned and state-enforced torture, having to wait until you’re almost dead to get basic treatment. It’s inexcusable,” she added.
Vasquez-Giroux also pushed back against one of the state’s attorneys who said the lawsuit stems merely from the notion that the women “simply do not like Texas’s restrictions on abortion”.
“Numerically, she’s correct. Eighty per cent of people do not like these restrictions on abortion … but really, this is another facet of the desperation and the underhandedness of the Republican party and anti-abortion extremists.
“They see someone who has suffered so much trying to build their family and carry to term a child they desperately wanted and their answer is, ‘You just don’t like me,’ like that’s their takeaway. That’s sickening and pathetic.”
