A Country of "Walking Coffins"

Kate Cox is leaving Texas to get an abortion. But what if there was no place to go?

Dec 12, 2023

Kate Cox is leaving Texas to get an abortion. The 31 year-old mother-of-two didn’t want to watch her baby have a heart attack or die of suffocation. She didn’t want to put her health at risk, or ruin her chances of having another child in the future. That’s why Cox, after being given a fatal fetal diagnosis, asked for an emergency order to get an abortion: it was her plea to the state to prevent her baby’s suffering and to stop her own.

In a just world, it would be unthinkable for a woman to have to beg the courts for such a thing. But Cox doesn’t live in a just world, she lives in Texas. And in Texas, women are expected to carry doomed pregnancies to term.

Even after a judge granted Cox the emergency order, Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton went straight to the Texas Supreme Court. That’s how intent he is on ensuring women suffer through every single day of their nonviable pregnancies. So on Friday, when the Court agreed to temporarily block Cox from getting an abortion—expecting her to once again plead for just a few scraps of humanity—she made the decision to leave.

I’m so glad that she did. The truth is that it was remarkably brave and selfless of Cox to stay as long as she did. She was clearly fighting the good fight in Texas so that any women who come after her might have an easier time, but there’s only so long someone can put their health at risk.

As relieved as I am that Cox will travel to a state where she can get the compassionate care she needs, there’s a question festering at the back of my mind:

What if there was no other state to go to? What if instead of being forced to travel to a neighboring state—an already-impossible hurdle for many Americans—Cox had to travel to a nearby country?

That is not some hyperbolic hypothetical: it’s exactly what life would look like under Republicans’ 15-week national ban. And we can’t let voters forget it.

Republican lawmakers and conservative activists have been pushing a 15-week national ban as a supposed ‘compromise’ on abortion: it’s the focus of their abortion talking points, and powerful anti-choice groups expect candidates to publicly declare their support for such legislation.

But this ‘middle ground’ would force women like Kate Cox to either flee the country entirely or carry their doomed pregnancies to term just to watch their babies die. Remember Samantha Casiano vomiting on the stand while recounting her daughter taking pained last breaths? That’s what Republicans’ compromise would look like every day, in every state.

Because despite all of the ‘reasonable’ rhetoric, the GOP’s 15-week ban is not unlike Texas’ law: there is no ‘exception’ for fatal fetal abnormalities. Women in every state would be forced to carry dying fetuses to term. And even though doomed pregnancies are more likely to put women’s health and lives at risk, abortions for health and life would only be granted when women are deemed sufficiently ‘sick enough’—a standard decided not by doctors, but politicians.

In Cox’s case, the Texas lawyer fighting to stop the emergency order argued that she wasn’t “at any more of a risk, let alone life-threatening, than the countless women who give birth every day with similar medical histories.” Paxton even sent a letter to area hospitals warning them against providing Cox an abortion, claiming that she hadn’t proved her condition was “life-threatening.”

Just how sick was Cox supposed to get before she was allowed care? Should she have waited until she was dying of sepsis? That’s what Amanda Zurawski’s doctors did out of fear of the state’s ban, and the near-fatal infection caused one of Zurawski’s fallopian tubes to permanently close. Now that she’s suing, though, Texas says her doctors didn’t act quickly enough.

Imagine what this kind of cruelty and confusion looks like on a national level: About 120,000 pregnancies are diagnosed with fetal abnormalities every year, and congenital malformations are responsible for thousands of infant deaths per year.

Are Republicans prepared for a country where thousands or tens of thousands of women are suing for the right not to be treated as “walking coffins”? Do they understand what it will mean when local hospital NICUs are overloaded with dying babies, or what it will do to communities as families go bankrupt from medical costs and baby funerals? Will they be buying stock in infant burial gowns?

Even if conservatives do allow abortions in pregnancies with fatal abnormalities—telling us how generous they are to do so—the nightmare won’t end, and women will still have to beg for care: Parents will have to show that a baby born without a skull is, in fact, going to die. Or that their daughter’s condition constitutes being “lethal” even though she’ll survive a few days rather than a few hours.

People who might otherwise be able to grieve and recover at home in peace will still be treated to lawyers and courtrooms. Can someone show me where the ‘pro-life’ part is in all of this?

There’s a reason that Cox’s story has attracted national and international attention. The whole world truly has been watching the cruelty of abortion bans in real time. But what’s happening in Texas isn’t some unthinkable outlier—it’s the reality in half the country. And conservatives are planning for a rapid expansion everywhere else.

In October, I published an investigation into how the anti-abortion movement is quietly spending millions of dollars on new initiatives for ‘prenatal counseling’ and ‘perinatal hospice care’. This isn’t a coincidence. These groups are working to change legislation, medical norms, patient care and more—all in the service of pressuring and forcing American women to carry doomed pregnancies to term. They’ve prepared for cases like Cox’s, and they’re not planning on backing down.

As the saying goes: None of the suffering we’re seeing is a bug—it’s a feature. Most insulting of all, Republicans want to sell us that suffering a ‘compromise’, as if they’re doing us a favor.

Anyone who has been horrified by what’s happened to Kate Cox needs to understand that the cruelty doesn’t stop with her story, and it certainly won’t stop for you.