Five residents of Texas were denied terminations of pregnancy despite serious complications. Monday evening, they filed a complaint against the anti-abortion laws in force in this vast conservative state. This is the first complaint filed by women who have been refused abortions since the Supreme Court of UNITED STATES blasted the right to abortion in June.
It “contains frightening, direct testimonies of women who almost lost their lives after a refusal of care”, moved the Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who lent their support to them in a statement on Tuesday. These women wanted to carry their pregnancies to term but had discovered during medical examinations that their fetus was not viable.
“Danger of death or serious disability for the mother”
In their complaint, they claim that their doctors refused to perform abortions, despite the risk of bleeding and infection. They attribute their reluctance to the various laws prohibiting abortion in Texas, one of which provides up to 99 years in prison for doctors defying the ban.
These laws provide for exceptions in the event of “danger of death or serious handicap for the mother”, but according to the complainants, they are too vague. One of them, Amanda Zurawski, 35, had her waters rupture at 17 weeks pregnant, far too early for the fetus to survive. Her hospital, however, waited until she showed signs of infection three days later before expelling the fetus.
According to the complaint, she had sepsis, spent several days in intensive care and lost one of her tubes because of this refusal of treatment. Unlike the other complaints filed by doctors or associations since the Supreme Court dynamited the right to abortion in June, this action does not attack the ban on abortion but calls on justice to “clarify the ‘scope of exceptions’.
