A harrowing new documentary about three Texas women who suffered unspeakable tragedy after they were refused abortions hits theaters Friday, as the battle over reproductive rights looms large ahead of the US election.
“Zurawski v. Texas” follows Amanda Zurawski, Samantha Casiano and Austin Dennard through hospitals, courtrooms and funerals, in the months after the US Supreme Court — filled with judges appointed by Donald Trump — ended federal protections for abortion access.
All three women learned early that their pregnancies were not viable because of severe and uncurable medical problems, but were turned away by doctors who were too afraid to intervene due to the state’s highly punitive new laws.
Zurawski went into septic shock after her cervix dilated at just 18 weeks. She spent days fighting for her life in intensive care; damage to her uterus means she is unlikely to be able to get pregnant again.
Casiano was forced to bring her pregnancy to term, despite learning about her fetus’s fatal condition at 20 weeks. She watched her newborn daughter gasp for breath for four hours before she died.
Dennard, herself an obstetrician-gynecologist, had to travel to another state for her own abortion, when she learned that the fetus she was carrying was missing parts of its brain and skull, and could not survive.
The women agreed to let cameras follow them as they mounted legal challenges. The film is produced by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
“Watching what was happening in Texas was devastating,” the film’s co-director Abbie Perrault told AFP.
“We were just so incredibly moved that through all of the pain that they were experiencing, they were willing to put their faces and names out in public, and really stand up and try to make a change in Texas.”
Abortion on the ballot
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris will visit Houston for a rally on Friday, where she is expected to slam Texas’s ultra-strict abortion laws.
The visit to a state her party cannot win just 11 days before the election underlines the national significance of reproductive rights in the race for the White House.
Democrats are keen to highlight Republican-sponsored laws banning abortions as soon as a heartbeat is detected, like in Texas, that they believe are deeply unpopular nationwide, and have especially shocked many women.
Zurawski’s case has become particularly well-known. She was the named plaintiff of a high-profile class-action suit against Texas, and her plight was name-checked during last month’s vice presidential debate.
“If you don’t know an Amanda… you soon will,” Harris’s running mate Tim Walz said, warning of the spread of abortion bans if the Republicans prevail.
Among the documentary’s most startling scenes are court hearings in which the women are relentlessly badgered by off-screen state attorneys, even as they sob through recounting their traumas.
In one scene, Casiano has to pause her testimony to be physically sick at the witness stand.
In another, the film shows the body of the daughter who lived for just four dreadful hours.
Casiano “felt very strongly that people needed to see her daughter’s face, and understand that her daughter is a real person that suffered under these laws,” said Perrault.
‘Eerie’
Along with the three women, “Zurawski v Texas” focuses on Molly Duane, a dogged attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who took up their cases.
But their legal progress has been limited. Any victories have been swiftly reversed by the Texas Supreme Court.
State attorneys pin blame on hospitals, asking why plaintiffs did not simply sue their doctors.
But while Texas does technically have limited medical exemptions for abortions, Duane argues that these are so unclear that doctors are justifiably too terrified to operate.
The Texas Medical Board, when asked to clarify the exemptions, denies responsibility, or maintains an “eerie” silence, Duane says in the film.
Perrault and co-director Maisie Crow hope the film can help Americans “to understand more deeply what the laws that are in place are doing” before they cast their votes.
“People wanted to act like these women’s stories weren’t happening,” she said.
“It’s maybe convenient to believe they weren’t.”
