A Texas woman who testified how she was denied an abortion despite her unborn child’s fatal condition vomited on the stand Wednesday while retelling the trauma she endured during her forced pregnancy and its aftermath.
Samantha Casiano got sick while testifying that she “felt like I was imprisoned in my own body” when she learned of her baby’s defect and was told she would have to continue her pregnancy and then bury her daughter hours after birth, NBC News reported.
Casiano is one of 13 women and two OB-GYNs who are suing the state of Texas over its abortion ban — one of the strictest in the country.
Three of the plaintiffs, including Casiano, gave heartbreaking accounts of the trauma they endured when they were denied abortions in the Lone Star State.
Casiano told the courtroom that she learned halfway through her pregnancy that her baby had anencephaly, a fatal condition in which the infant’s brain and skull did not fully form. She said she was told her daughter would not survive out of the womb and was given a pamphlet on funeral homes.
“I felt like I was abandoned,” Casiano said. “I had this funeral home paper and this is just supposed to be a scan day.”
She read aloud the doctor’s note that determined her pregnancy was high-risk but began to sob and soon got so upset she threw up — something she said she never did before she was pregnant but does frequently now.
Casiano gave birth to her baby, whom she named Halo, early and watched her child die four hours later.
She said retelling the traumatic experience she went through puts her body back into those times “and it just reacts,” according to NBC.
“I now have a psychiatrist,” she reportedly said. “I now vomit a lot more. I’ve never vomited before like that, ever, before my pregnancy. My body’s never reacted that way.”
Casiano and her co-plaintiffs argue that the Texas law, which bans all abortions except in cases of serious risk of death to the woman, is too vague. They want the court to clarify which situations and conditions constitute a medical emergency.
The lead plaintiff in the suit filed in March, Amanda Zurawski, nearly died from pregnancy complications after she was denied an abortion due to the law.
She told the court through tears how she was unable to terminate her high-risk pregnancy and came close to death when she developed sepsis after her water broke at 18 weeks.
A third woman, Ashley Brandt, testified that she was pregnant with twins when she learned one of the babies had acrania, a fatal and untreatable defect. The longer the baby was in the womb with its twin, the more it jeopardized its sibling’s chance of survival, the news station reported.
The mom-to-be decided to get an abortion of the nonviable fetus in Colorado in order to save the other baby. She gave birth to a healthy baby girl at 38 weeks and said if she hadn’t crossed state lines for the procedure, she would have been forced to give birth to a daughter who had no shot at survival.
“I would have had to give birth to an identical version of my daughter without a skull and without a brain and hold her until she died,” Brandt said, according to NBC.
Attorneys for the women said the language of Texas’ abortion ban law has created fear and confusion among doctors over when they can legally end the pregnancies of women who are suffering health risk complications. They have asked the judge to issue a temporary injunction blocking the ban in cases of high-risk pregnancies.
Doctors who violate the state law face severe penalties — including the potential to lose their medical licenses, spending up to 99 years in prison and incurring fines of at least $100,000, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights which helped bring the lawsuit.
The state’s attorney Amy Pletscher said the women “simply do not like Texas’ restrictions on abortion” and said the court’s job is “not to legislate.”
Following more testimonies, District Judge Jessica Mangrum will issue a decision on both the request for an injunction and the state’s request to toss the lawsuit altogether.
The women are the first to sue a US state over abortion access since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and subsequent abortion bans in conservative-controlled states across the country.
With Post wires
