A Young Woman Almost Died Due to Texas’ Abortion Bans. Now She’s Battling to Save Other Women.
Amanda Zurawski's water broke at 18 weeks and she still had a heartbeat. Only when Amanda was dying from sepsis were Texas doctors legally allowed to safe her life. Here, her story.
I can’t carry a pregnancy again,” Amanda Zurawski said sadly, but matter of factly. The Austin, Texas, resident will never be able to be pregnant again because she was refused a necessary abortion in her state after her water broke at 18 weeks, long before her baby would have been viable.
Tragically, the delay in receiving what used to be normal healthcare allowed a massive bacterial infection to develop and turn into a life-threatening sepsis infection—which ravaged her body and reproductive organs.
But that’s what life is now like in the post-Roe world for pregnant women who run into serious pregnancy complications in Texas and 21 other Republican-led states. These states have all banned abortions with virtually no exceptions unless the mother is on the verge of death.
Zurawski can thank Texas’ three draconian abortion bans for her own brush with death—and a future in which she can never risk pregnancy again. Zurawski’s baby girl still had a heartbeat after her mom-to-be’s amniotic sac ruptured prematurely at 18 weeks—a condition called PPROM (premature rupture of the membranes)—so her doctor was not legally able to give her an abortion in Texas and was forced to send her home to wait.
What she awaited was the development and spread of an inevitable bacterial infection throughout her uterus and then her body. Amanda and her husband Josh had no choice but to sit nervously at home for three days while toxic bacteria grew, and then swiftly turned into a dangerous and damaging case of septic shock that ruined her reproductive organs. The sepsis also killed her fetus—and only then could an abortion be provided as a ‘medical emergency’ exception in Texas.
Before the procedure could be performed, Zurawski twice went into septic shock, a condition that has a frightening 60 percent mortality rate. She only survived thanks to the heroic efforts of her doctors.
After this terrifying and traumatizing experience the 36 year-old, an account manager in the tech industry has become determined to warn other women and their families about the dangers of abortion bans, including to women who never planned to have an abortion ever.
She wants Americans to know that pregnant women like herself who experience serious complications may desperately need an abortion to save their health but may be forced to wait like she was until they are near death.
As part of her resolve to change Texas’s draconian bans, she was the lead plaintiff in Zurawski v. State of Texas. Along with 21 other co-plaintiffs, she begged the Texas Supreme Court to ‘clarify’ the scope of the ‘medical emergency’ exceptions allowed under the state’s abortion bans. The Texas Supreme Court disappointingly declined to do so.
Now Amanda and her husband Josh have become vocal spokespeople at events for the Biden/ Harris campaign and Harris campaigns. Both Amanda and her husband will speak on the first night of the Democratic National Convention along with two other women opposed to abortion bans because of their own tragic experiences.
The first of those other women, is Hadley Duvall, a young Kentucky college grad who was raped repeatedly by her stepfather until she got pregnant at 12 and then miscarried. She was grateful that she would have at least had the choice to get an abortion at that time - something that teens today in red states with no exception for rape or incest, do not.
The second woman, Kailtyn Joshua, is a Louisiana mom who was turned away from two ERs when she was miscarrying her 2nd baby in her first trimester despite bleeding so much that her jeans were soaked. It took weeks for the cramps and bleeding to stop. With Lousiana’s strict abortion ban, Joshua felt that getting proper prenatal care was impossible. Now, she is afraid to get pregnant again.
For Zurawski, her commitment has also involved filming a national ad speaking out against abortion bans and telling the couple’s story.
Zurawski’s journey—from grieving mom of a baby she had desperately wanted, to a lawsuit against the state of Texas to a national advocate against abortion bans—began as she lay in her hospital bed recovering from the physically and emotionally grueling experience. After doctors had spent three days battling to save her life in the ICU, she and Josh began talking about what they could do to change Texas’ abortion laws so that other women wouldn’t suffer the horror she had been through.
The aftermath of losing her baby and nearly her life has been brutal for Zurawski, who was distraught that the sepsis had left such massive scarring on her reproductive organs that both of her fallopian tubes were completely blocked and her uterus collapsed. She and Josh had wanted a family so much.
A reproductive endocrinologist was later able to surgically unblock one of her tubes and and rebuild her uterus in surgery. But it’s still not safe for her to carry a pregnancy again because “my anatomy essentially has been permanently compromised,” she said.
“How is that pro-life for my future children and my future family?
Amanda and Josh began to talk about how they felt the need to do something immediately, to warn other women about the dangers of abortion bans. But the couple had no idea at the time what they could do.
Amanda realized, as she fought to regain her strength after undergoing an abortion during her sepsis ordeal, a blood transfusion and massive doses of antibiotics, that “as insane as it sounds, my scenario is the best version of this story because I had all the resources to survive sepsis,” she said.
I was lucky to have a devoted husband at home, ready to rush me to the emergency room as soon as my fever spiked and I became incoherent—which happened suddenly, three days after my water broke, Zurawaski related.
“But what about people who are at jobs, or who have other children and can’t find childcare, or don’t have a spouse that can get them to a hospital? They’re going to die,” she said. “That’s going to be the outcome for a lot of people if things don’t change.”
She decided that she had a responsibility to tell her story. “If we don’t speak out, it’s not going to get better … so I really do feel like this is not where I want to be in life, but this is what life has dealt me. I feel very passionately that this is my duty. This is why I’m on earth—to fight this fight for so many.”
First, Zurawski went public with her harrowing story, speaking to a media outlet, and as word spread about her nightmarish experience, she was approached by lawyers from the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) who wanted her to sign on to a lawsuit suing the state of Texas .
The suit was filed on March 6, 2023, and by November 2023, there were a total of 22 plaintiffs named in the lawsuit, including 20 women denied abortion care.
Heartbreakingly for Amanda and her fellow defendants the Texas Supreme Court ruled on May 31 2024 that it did not need to clarify what medical exceptions would be allowed for Texan women under their state’s abortion ban.
“It was very indicative of how the state [of Texas] feels about us. They don’t give us any sort of credibility. It really shows how they feel about the lives of pregnant people in Texas,” she pointed out.
“They just don’t care.”
She laughs ironically when she’s asked if she feels like she’s been living in a real life Handmaid’s Tale in Texas. “It feels like I’m trapped in some sort of dystopian novel.”
Physicians and hospitals don’t dare violate Texas’ strict abortion laws for very clear reasons. Doctors face fines of up to $100,000, prison sentences of up to 99 years, and can also have their state medical licenses revoked. All of which explains why there have only been about 34 abortions performed in Texas—a state of almost 30 million people—since the bans were imposed. Before the three new abortion bans, there were more than 50,000 abortions a year in the state.
A few months ago Amanda and Josh lived through the sad anniversary of the loss of their beloved baby girl and Amanda’s own emergency hospitalization.
Zurawski said the anniversary was particularly difficult for her husband Josh in a way that was different from her. “On the anniversary ( of the day she was first hospitalized), I was obviously mourning the loss of our baby. But something he shared with me was that it was really difficult for him since he was not only mourning the loss of our baby but he was reliving that day and what it did to me. He lost a child and he almost lost his wife.”
She continued, “Josh has already told some of our friends who are family planning, that as well as making a plan for when to try to have children, and a plan for where you are going to deliver and what’s going to be on your delivery playlist—now you also have to have a plan for what you’re going to do if things go south. How are you going to get out of the state if you need to? That’s the sad reality. It’s not something anybody wants to think about, but that’s the reality that our [Republican] lawmakers have put us in.”
Texas currently has a Republican governor, two Republican U.S. senators, and Republicans control both the Senate and the House of Representatives in the state legislature.
With that in mind, Zurawski said she hopes that by going very public with her story she can encourage people to come out and vote in the upcoming elections for the “right people” who support the right to choose.
In the meantime, the Zurawskis have honored the daughter they lost by naming her Willow and memorializing her in a very special way.
“When Josh and I were in the hospital, we talked about whether to name her and I said it would be really nice to name her after a plant or flower or tree that we could plant in the yard of the new house we had just bought,” she said.
The couple decided on the name “Willow” since the desert willow is native to Texas, weeping willows are native to Indiana, the couple’s home state, and the meaning of the name is “strength.”
“We also felt that it was very fitting for us because you can take the roots of one willow and use those to plant new willows. So we like to think we’re going to take her roots to plant our future babies.”
Zurawski revealed that because she can no longer support a pregnancy in her own uterus, she and Josh have done a number of rounds of IVF and were thankfully able to create some embryos.
“We are hopeful that we will still have children, but will have to have somebody help us out with that,” she confided. “We’re hopeful we will have something exciting in 2024.”
This story was originally published on American Journal News.