It was nearly two months ago when five Texas women who were denied abortions despite grave risks sued the Lone Star State. The New York Times noted that their litigation marked “the first time that pregnant women themselves have taken legal action against the bans that have shut down access to abortion across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.”
As we discussed soon after, the women who filed the case actually wanted to be pregnant — until they learned about their tragic circumstances, including two fetuses that had no skulls.
Legal filings can sometimes be dry and technical, but this lawsuit was a qualitatively different kind of document. As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained, the filing detailed “the gruesome reality of life in a post-Roe America, specifically in Texas.” The Times’ report added that one of the plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, “was told she was not yet sick enough to receive an abortion, then twice became septic, and was left with so much scar tissue that one of her fallopian tubes is permanently closed.”
“You don’t think you’re somebody who’s going to need an abortion, let alone an abortion to save my life,” Zurawski said. “If anybody reads my story, I don’t care where they are on the political spectrum, very few people would agree there is anything pro-life about this.”
This week, Zurawski testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on abortion policy, and as HuffPost noted, she at one point had a specific audience in mind: her own senators.
Amanda Zurawski tore into GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas at a Senate hearing on Wednesday over the state’s abortion ban, saying she “nearly died on their watch” after being denied care in a pregnancy crisis.
“I wanted to address my senators, Cruz and Cornyn, neither of whom, regrettably, are in the room right now. But I would like for them to know that what happened to me … it’s a direct result of the policies that…
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