The unforgivable war on American women

From 1973-2022, U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) created and upheld the right to an abortion prior to the moment a fetus became viable. Those decisions were overturned by the court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, which held that abortion could be regulated by the states. There followed an avalanche of state legislation that continues to this day, and amidst the chaos of hastily conceived and widely varying laws approximately 14 states (including Oklahoma) passed laws banning abortions almost entirely. Unfortunately, many of those laws are so badly written, so purposely vague, that they frighten health care providers away from performing abortions even in situations where the fetus is not viable, and the mother’s life is in jeopardy. They constitute a war on American women that denies them the freedom to make their own health care decisions and, in some cases, forces them to endure pain and humiliation and risk their future health or even their life in exchange for attempting to have a child. It is utterly unconscionable.

Consider the case of Kate Cox, a happily married 31-year-old mother of two who lived in Houston and wanted to have another child. After becoming pregnant, her doctor diagnosed her with Trisomy 18, a potentially lethal condition that guaranteed her child would live only a few days after birth. Her doctor recommended an abortion and counseled that continuing the pregnancy could imperil her health and her future chances to become pregnant again.

Cox made multiple visits to local emergency rooms complaining of pain while agonizing over what to do, and while researching her condition discovered that 20 women and two doctors in Texas had sued the state because they had not been able to get abortions despite facing medical emergencies. Texas has multiple overlapping bans on abortion, and in theory they have carve-outs allowing for abortions in certain situations. But the statutes are vague, and because Texas threatens doctors who break the laws with up to 99 years in prison, most health care providers are afraid to perform the procedure even when medically necessary.

Cox decided to sue and became the first actively pregnant woman to sue for the right to an abortion since 1973. A lower court supported her, ruling that under the circumstances she qualified for an emergency abortion. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton then targeted Cox, sending letters to Houston area doctors that said the lower court order “…will not insulate you, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws.”

The case was appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, which ruled against Cox, but by then she had fled the state to have an abortion procedure where it was legal. She had the means to do that, but thousands of others do not and could die or suffer permanent damage if faced with the same circumstances.

Another example is Amanda Zurawski, a married 35-year-old who became pregnant in 2022 after 18 months of fertility treatment but, like Cox, had the misfortune of living in Texas. Her water broke after 18 weeks, meaning the fetus could not survive. However, doctors refused to perform an abortion until her life was in imminent danger. So, she waited, and waited, and waited, and then got sepsis and spent three days in intensive care before receiving the abortion and eventually recovering.

Internal scars from the sepsis means she may never be able to get pregnant again, and the emotional distress and pain were overwhelming. As she put it: “I never in my wildest dreams thought that the laws that I was so angry about would also pose a threat to my life and prevent me from accessing safe healthcare in 2022 in the United States of America.”

Zurawski was so devastated by her experience that she became the lead plaintiff in Zurawski v. State of Texas, the case Kate Cox discovered that now stands before the Texas Supreme Court and still includes more than 20 women fighting for the rights of other women to receive abortions when medically necessary.

And Texas is not the only state where women are at risk. Similar suits are ongoing in Idaho and Tennessee, and here in Oklahoma, which like Texas passed multiple overlapping and badly written laws that do not clearly define the circumstances in which doctors can perform abortions, there is the horrifying case of Jaci Statton.

Ms. Statton is 25, married, and lives near Shawnee with her husband and three children. When she became pregnant last spring, doctors discovered that she had a molar pregnancy, a very rare condition that meant her fetus would not develop properly and could become cancerous. Statton went to an emergency room bleeding and was denied treatment because doctors said she needed an abortion, and they could not provide one.

After being referred to multiple hospitals she was finally told “…the best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us, or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.”

Statton fled to Kansas to receive an abortion. She needs more surgery to remove cancerous tissue from her body and may need chemotherapy.

How is any of this humane? How is it moral or ethical? Reasonable people may disagree over when and under what conditions abortion should be acceptable, but in all three of these cases medical help was delayed or withheld even though the fetuses were non-viable, and the lives of the mothers were at risk. What greater good was served by forcing those women to suffer emotionally and physically, making them beg for health care, scaring their doctors, or terrorizing them to the point two of them fled to other states for their own safety? What sort of society does that to women? And how many more women have suffered, and will continue to suffer, because they lack the resources that Cox, Zurawski, and Statton had?

All the laws regulating abortion must be clarified in a manner that prioritizes the lives of women and makes it clear that doctors — and doctors alone — should determine when abortions are medically necessary. Until we do that we are living in the dark ages, ruled by misogynists who do not value the lives of women, and by hypocritical and sexist men who would never deny themselves life-saving treatment of any kind but feel morally superior presiding over a society that will deny such care to women.

Who would want women they love to live in such a place?

Lance Janda holds a PhD in History from the University of Oklahoma and has more than 30 years of experience in higher education. He is the author of “Stronger Than Custom: West Point and the Admission of Women”, among other works.