How a trial in Texas changed the story of abortion rights in America

During the five decades that followed Roe v. Wade, lawsuit after lawsuit in states across the country chipped away at abortion rights. And again and again, the people who went to court to defend those rights were physicians who often spoke in clinical and abstract terms.

"The entirety of abortion rights history is a history of doctors appearing in court to represent their own interests and the interests of pregnant people," said Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas-Austin.

But in July, in a Texas courtroom, the case for abortion was made by women themselves who had been denied abortions and sued the state to clarify the exceptions to its ban, which makes it illegal to perform an abortion unless a patient is facing death or "substantial impairment of a major bodily function."

The aspiring mothers described in vivid, harrowing detail how the state's abortion ban had endangered their health, traumatized them, and, in the case of Samantha Casiano, forced her to carry and give birth to a baby girl without a formed skull or brain only to watch her die a tortured death four hours later.

"She was gasping for air," Casiano testified on the witness stand. She described how her baby turned purple and her eyeballs were bleeding. "I just kept telling myself and my baby that 'I'm so sorry that this has happened to you.' I felt so bad. She had no mercy. There was no mercy there for her."

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/09/1187378801/texas-abortion-law-trial-reproductive-rights