On the morning of June 24, 2022, the federal courthouse in downtown Dallas was reinforced with boards and fences. Protests were anticipated to follow the news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade. For Texans like me, that would mean already-tight restrictions would turn into a near total ban on abortion. Though it wasn’t a surprise, I still felt shocked when the ruling became reality. Thousands marched on the streets that day and for weeks after.
In the years following, I’ve met and photographed fellow Texans who were denied abortions despite lethal fetal anomalies that endangered their lives, health, and future fertility. Some were among the 20 women who sued the state in Zurawski v. Texas last year, asking for clarification on the scope of the current ban’s “medical emergency” exception. Another woman, Kate Cox, was pregnant as she sued the state in an attempt to obtain an emergency abortion. She was denied. Another, Miranda Michel, was pregnant with twins with a 0 percent chance of viability. She was left to carry them to term; they died in her arms four hours later.
As of late May, the Texas Supreme Court had shut down the Zurawksi legal challenge, rejecting a lower court’s clarification of the law’s medical exceptions. Doctors are left with ambiguities and fear of major consequences, including up to 99 years in prison. People with pregnancy complications are left with fewer options, less professional health care guidance, and more questions. They can choose to leave the state (if they’re able) or carry a pregnancy that won’t yield a healthy, living baby—with a risk to their own lives as well. That is never a simple decision to make.
All these women I met and photographed wanted to be mothers. Helios, Perseus, Chloe, Amelia, and Thomas were among the names they chose to keep their lost babies alive in their hearts. These women are among the millions in Texas who now have substantially less authority over their bodies. Our bodies.
Linda Coffee, one of two lawyers who represented “Jane Roe” in Roe v. Wade, was 30 when the Supreme Court agreed that the constitutional right to privacy extended to abortion. Now 81, she is one of few who worked on the case who lived to see it overturned.
Ashley Brandt holds her 17-month-old daughter Marley in the family’s nursery. Brandt, one of the Zurawski plaintiffs, had to travel out of state for a selective termination when one of her twins was found to be nonviable. She planted a tree outside the nursery window in honor of the daughter that was aborted.
Left: Miranda Michel was pregnant with nonviable twins, but, due to Texas laws, she carried the doomed pregnancy to term. Her birth consisted of a hectic C-section as she fought for consciousness. The footprints of her twins, Helios and Perseus, were recorded in ink in the hospital room. Right: Lauren Miller, another of the Zurawski plaintiffs, points to the last images of Thomas. A twin, Thomas was developing without a proper brain, heart, or stomach due to Trisomy 18. Like Brandt, Miller had to travel out of state for a selective fetal reduction—to protect her own life and that of her other twin, Henry.Lauren Hall, also among the plaintiffs, stands in the room that she and her husband had prepared as a nursery. Hall had to travel to Washington state for an abortion after receiving a diagnosis that her fetus had a fatal anomaly.
Miller, who lost Thomas to Trisomy 18, sits in her home. “You don’t have time to grieve, you’re under a lot of stress, and [I can’t speak for all the plaintiffs, but] on some level we’re all just really mad because we shouldn’t have had to go through that,” she said.
Left: Michel cradles Helios and Perseus Langley in her arms after delivery. From rural northeast Texas, Miranda was surrounded by abortion bans in Oklahoma and Arkansas, and she feared circumventing the law and fleeing the state. The twins died four hours after birth. Right: Helios and Perseus are laid to rest.Kate Cox, a mother of two, sued Texas late last year seeking legal permission for an emergency abortion. She’d always imagined having more kids, but her fetus had been diagnosed with Trisomy 18. There were so many malformations to her daughter’s brain, spine, and neural tube that the baby would probably die in utero or shortly after being born. Cox’s ability to have future children was also at risk. Her case was shot down by the Texas Supreme Court. She traveled to New Mexico to get the healthcare she needed.
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