Abortion is Healthcare: One Texas Writer Wonders What Might’ve Happened if She Wasn’t Able to Get the Abortion That Saved Her Life

It happened on a playground, ironically. It was a Sunday morning in March 2017, and we’d taken our 20-month-old daughter to our neighborhood elementary school to burn off some energy. As my husband pushed her on the swing, a searing pain suddenly radiated through my left side. I sat down at a picnic table, my toes curling as a vise wrapped around my pelvic area, squeezing tighter and tighter.

We’d recently started trying for a second child, and I’d had what I thought was an early miscarriage in late February. There had been nine days of heavy bleeding, including a fainting spell, and bloodwork every few days to check that my hCG levels, the hormone the body creates during pregnancy, were going down, as expected. My (male) OBGYN even cancelled my ultrasound appointment because everything seemed fine. (Five years later, I’m still mad at myself for not pushing harder for that ultrasound.) I’d been having spotting and cramping on and off for the past few weeks, but nothing like this.

“Something’s not right,” I gasped to my husband. I took deep, shallow breaths, trying not to vomit, as we walked the long block home. I made it to the couch and called my doctor.

Since it was a Sunday, the nurse on call told me to go to the ER. I was lucky. I lived 10 minutes from the hospital, had a supportive partner to drive me there—not to mention a car—and health insurance. As I laid in the hospital bed, my husband and daughter waiting in the room with me, I was worried about my little girl touching everything. Germs, germs, germs. I should have been worried about dying.

The (male) ER doc who examined me said it couldn’t be a ruptured ectopic pregnancy because I was too calm—I should have been moaning in pain or passed out, apparently. But he ordered an ultrasound, just in case.

Turns out, he was wrong. An embryo was attached to my fallopian tube, instead of implanting in the uterus as it should have, and it had ruptured the tube, causing internal bleeding. I’d been walking around with a ticking time bomb inside of me for weeks, and it had exploded at the playground.

As they wheeled me into surgery to remove my fallopian tube and stop the bleeding, I wasn’t mourning the clump of cells inside of me. That was never a baby; it was a medical emergency. I was thinking about my living, breathing daughter and hoping that I made it through the surgery so she would still have a mother the next day.

If left untreated, an ectopic pregnancy can be fatal, but my story has a happy ending. My surgery went fine; my other fallopian tube still worked; and I went on to have another successful pregnancy and deliver a healthy baby boy a year later. (Though once you have had an ectopic pregnancy, you are at higher risk of having another one.)

I already considered myself one of the lucky ones, but when Texas, where I live, passed SB 8 in September 2021, I realized just how dangerous an ectopic pregnancy could be in a post-Roe world.

SB 8 banned abortions after six weeks, when most women don’t even know they are pregnant yet, and allowed third-party lawsuits of $10,000 or more against anyone who helped a patient receive an abortion after the new legal limit. And even though the bill included a medical exemption for ectopic pregnancies, doctors quickly spoke out, saying that SB 8 left questions about when they could legally intervene—for example, did the ectopic pregnancy have to rupture, putting the mother’s life at immediate risk, first? One woman in a rural part of South Texas reportedly drove fifteen hours to New Mexico to have her ectopic pregnancy removed because her regular doctor was too scared of being sued to do it.

Texas fertility doctors have also sounded the alarm that pharmacists are refusing to prescribe Methotrexate to treat ectopic pregnancies, citing SB 8 restrictions. That all but guarantees the ectopic will rupture like mine did, setting up the patient to potentially bleed out. Looking back at my own experience, there are still many what ifs. What if I’d waited to go to the ER? What if the ER doctor had sent me home without an ultrasound? So much trust is put in medical professionals, but mistakes happen—even more so when doctors are scared of being sued.

Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, 16 states have trigger laws making abortion illegal either immediately or in a matter of weeks. With ectopic pregnancies, there is zero chance of life for the “baby,” yet some states will not allow the mother to have an abortion of the unviable fetus. If that sounds archaic and downright stupid to you, you are in good company. More than 60 percent of Americans agree that abortion should be legal all or most of the time. Also stupid: In 2019, an Ohio bill allowed insurance companies to cover the surgical reimplantation of an ectopic pregnancy into the uterus. That’s not possible, yet multiple male politicians don’t seem to understand that.

Take Missouri state representative Brian Seitz, who in March introduced, and then quietly withdrew, HB 2810, a bill that would have made it a class A felony if an abortion “was performed or induced or was attempted…on a woman who has an ectopic pregnancy.”

In April, during hearings for Oklahoma’s strict, six-week abortion ban HB4327, State Senator Warren Hamilton wondered why the bill should include an exception for ectopic pregnancies. “I wonder how we square that with the idea of justice for all,” said Hamilton, who also opposed the measure’s exceptions for rape and incest.

These men are arguing that unviable pregnancies have more rights than women, making it clear that supporters are more concerned with controlling women’s bodies than protecting lives.

My story did not end in tragedy, but I fear for the lives of women who will face ectopic pregnancies in a post-Roe world. There is nothing about this decision that’s “pro-life.”