Shortly before America’s first presidential election since the fall of Roe v Wade, I want to tell you the story of Amanda Zurawski, a bright light in the center of a perfect, horrendous storm.
A little over two years ago, Zurawski was 18 weeks pregnant with her first child, a child she and her husband had conceived after a year and a half of fertility treatments. When she started leaking fluid and sought medical help, her doctors told her there was no chance the fetus would survive. But Zurawski lives in Texas, a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country: in May of the previous year, the governor, Greg Abbott, had signed into law the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, which makes performing abortions after detection of embryonic or fetal cardiac activity, usually at six weeks, illegal. That was on top of several existing statutes. Then, in June 2022, Roe fell.
And so Zurawski’s doctors told her that by the letter of the law – as far as they understood it; more on that later – in order to get the medical care she so desperately needed, either her daughter’s heart would have to stop, or her health would have to devolve into a “life-threatening situation”, something Zurawski has previous called “the most horrific version of a staring contest: whose life would end first? Mine, or my daughter’s?”
Her doctors advised her not to leave a 15-minute radius of the hospital lest her situation spiral, nixing the already unfathomable idea of getting into a car or on to a plane to seek help from a less restrictive state, and risking going into septic shock in the middle of the Texas desert, or 30,000ft up in the air. So she went home to grieve her impending loss and brace for what might come – during which time, Texas’s total abortion trigger ban went into effect, which made performing an abortion punishable by life in prison. And there Zurawski sat, waiting.
The next day, she developed sepsis – a condition her doctors felt was extreme enough to protect them from unintentionally violating the new law, allowing them to induce labor – and after three days in the ICU, she emerged from the experience having almost died, with her own future fertility compromised, and galvanized to make a change about the inhumane laws.
“I admittedly didn’t realize the ways in which an abortion truly is just healthcare,” Zurawski told me this week when I reached her by phone during her early morning walk with her sheepadoodle, Millie, in Austin, where she lives with her husband, Josh. “I couldn’t imagine that I would ever need or want one, since I was desperately trying to have a baby.”
The first moment abortion laws and her own fertility journey intersected was early on in the IVF process. The likelihood of a multiples pregnancy increases when using IVF, but as she is not able to carry multiples, her doctor had discussed the possibility of needing to perform selective reduction surgery if more than one embryo implanted, something that is currently illegal in Texas.
“So I was aware that these laws could affect us, but not from the perspective that I would need it to save my life, and be denied healthcare,” she told me. When she found herself in the unimaginable situation of being turned away from the hospital by doctors who wanted to help her, but weren’t sure they could, her eyes opened, and she and Josh vowed to fight.
Zurawski became the lead plaintiff in the landmark case, Zurawski v Texas, which sued the state of Texas to clarify the “medical emergency” exception in the law – a riveting and harrowing new documentary about the case follows Zurawski and two fellow plaintiffs through the legal fight – and soon found herself catapulted on to the national stage. Her natural charisma, straight talk, and tragic story calcified into a perfect trifecta with the power – so hopes Kamala Harris, who made her a campaign surrogate – of firing up the electorate.
“Humanizing it is what’s really getting people to sit up and pay attention,” Zurawski told me. “When you see a face and a real human who’s been impacted by this, it’s impossible to say, ‘This is reasonable, this is exactly what we want for our country.’” She paused to take a breath. “That’s barbaric.”
One of the most powerful scenes in the documentary shows Zurawski at home with her parents, her mother saying that she’s always voted Republican, but won’t after seeing her daughter almost die.
“Will I say they’re converted Democrats? No!” Zurawski told me, laughing, as she huffed her way up a hill. “But I do think they are single-issue voters, at least in this election. It opened up their eyes a little bit to the legislature, and how laws are written, and how bans go into effect, and the real implications.”
The real implications of, say, “medical exceptions” to a near-total abortion ban?
“They don’t work! Categorically!” she scoffed, citing the multiple patient plaintiffs in her case, alongside other women who have died in our country awaiting care their doctors are prohibited, by law, from providing. “Every pregnancy is inherently unique. Where else in healthcare do we put a blanket rule over where you can and cannot receive treatment?”
In her work over the years since she lost her pregnancy, she’s found that one key to changing minds lies in reframing the conversation from “pro-life” v “pro-choice” to one about healthcare access.
“For 50 years, the right worked really hard to politicize and weaponize and stigmatize the word ‘abortion’,” she said. You say pro-choice or pro-life, and people are already on a side. But some of the time, she pointed out, people simply don’t understand what it means to be on one side or the other.
“I’ll be at a rally, and someone will come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t realize that in 1985, when I had a D&C’” – a dilation-and-curettage surgical procedure that removes tissue from the uterus after miscarriage – “‘that’s an abortion.’ That’s the same as abortion care!”
As Zurawski has crisscrossed the country, campaigning for the Harris-Walz ticket, another part of her family has also moved: her embryos. In February, the Alabama supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children”. Zurawski, living in a state that has a similar political climate – one in which city councils have enacted abortion travel bans, in effect criminalizing the use of cities’ roads and highways to seek abortion care – panicked, and rushed to move them to a safer place.
“The implications of the ruling are just staggering,” she said. But, by some estimates, she admits that moving the embryos is itself a stopgap measure. “If Trump is elected, it doesn’t matter where the embryos are, or where we are. He will unleash chaos.”
She cited Project 2025, a rightwing policy manifesto for Trump’s second term that indicates plans not only to restrict birth control access and block access to abortion pills and medical equipment, but also potentially ban IVF and surrogacy in certain states.
“Well, Josh and I have to use a surrogate now because of what my body went through. It’s like they’re saying, you’re out of luck!” She paused, catching her breath on the other end of the phone, perhaps reaching the top of a hill. “It could theoretically prevent us from having children.”
So, what’s to be done? Watch the documentary. Share her story. Vote. Fight.
Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age and the novel Plays Well With Others
