How abortion became a battleground issue of the US election – podcast
Lauren Miller found out she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she was shocked and excited. But an early scan revealed that one of the twins was not developing at the same pace as the other. He had severe abnormalities, and a rare chromosomal disorder called Trisomy 18.
"It was something like nine doctors, several nurses, several genetic counsellors, and everybody said almost verbatim the same thing," Lauren tells Helen Pidd. "Which was that every day this unviable twin continued to grow, he put his healthy twin and myself at greater risk. And that was all they could say. That's where healthcare ends in Texas these days.
"There was this extreme environment of fear. I remember one genetic counsellor who just kept stopping mid sentence. She was afraid to say the word abortion out loud."
Lauren lives in Dallas, Texas, where abortion is illegal unless the pregnancy places the woman at risk of death or "substantial impairment of a major bodily function". Carter Sherman, the Guardian US reproductive health and justice reporter, explains why this exception does not necessarily reassure women wanting treatment.
"Every abortion ban in the country technically allows for abortions in medical emergencies," she tells Helen. "But doctors have said that these bans are worded so vaguely as to be unworkable, and so they're forced to wait as patients get sicker and sicker before they feel like they can legally intervene."
Lauren felt she had no choice but to leave Texas.
"For us, there really were no options," she says. "Because the different paths forward were to travel out of state to get the single foetal reduction, stay in Texas and get sicker and sicker until basically I was dead enough to get an abortion, or stay in Texas and all and basically lose the pregnancy."
Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, 14 states have brought in abortion bans, while four states have banned abortion past roughly six weeks of pregnancy. It has become a key election issue, and in some states will even be on the ballot in November.
How could the fight over reproductive rights shape the election?
