Texas patients, advocates travel to D.C. to mark fourth anniversary of abortion decision

To mark the four-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, dozens of Texans affected by the state’s abortion policies traveled to Capitol Hill to share their stories with federal lawmakers. 

They were among more than 150 patients, advocates and health care providers from 35 states who met this week with staff across more than 60 offices. Some also participated in a spotlight forum and press events with Democratic leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Patty Murray of Washington. 

The campaign, called “Abortion Stories on the Hill,” was organized by Free & Just, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for abortion access and reproductive health care. It formed in the wake of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the 2022 ruling that overturned Roe vs. Wade. 

The group from Texas included several patients from North Texas, some of whom have challenged Texas’ restrictive abortion laws in court. 

In 2022, Ashley Brandt traveled from Houston to Colorado in 2022 for a fetal reduction after learning that one of the twins she was carrying would not survive. Brandt, who now lives in Frisco, joined a lawsuit with nearly two dozen plaintiffs seeking medical exceptions to Texas’ abortion laws, which have no exceptions for rape, incest or severe fetal anomalies. 

In 2023, Kate Cox unsuccessfully tried to obtain an emergency exception after her baby was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a lethal genetic condition. She left Texas to terminate her pregnancy. 

In an interview, Brandt’s husband, Marcus, called the ultimate goal of his advocacy “lofty” — the codification of the right to abortion into federal law. Short of that, his wife said, federal lawmakers can reassess the source of their political donations and speak out.  

“We have to show them that it’s deeply, intimately affecting our lives,” Marcus Brandt said. “The government is overreaching into our most intimate moments. How can we, as Texans — and Americans at large, but especially as Texans — accept that?” 

With the passage of the Dobbs milestone, leaders with Texas groups opposing abortion said their organizations were thankful for that court decision. But they are making their own asks of the federal government. They continue to advocate for policies that would prevent abortion pills from being mailed into Texas and oppose shield laws in other states that protect medical providers that provide abortion care to Texans.  

Amy O’Donnell, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life, said her organization is advocating for the Food and Drug Administration to reinstate the requirement that patients meet in person with a physician before being prescribed abortion medications. It is also calling for enforcement of the Comstock Act, a law from 1873 that criminalizes the mailing of abortion-inducing materials. 

“We’re not content with the leadership we see in D.C.,” said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life. “And we’re not content with the current state of blue states trying to sabotage the enforcement of safety and health regulations that have been passed in states like Texas.” 

In the four years since the Dobbs decision, the standard of medical care available to pregnant Texans has diminished, an award-winning investigation published last year by The Dallas Morning News found. Based on more than 100 interviews, including with dozens of Texas physicians who had practiced under the laws, the series illuminated how medical decision making had been subsumed by fear and the threat of legal liability, rather than the best interest of patients. The reporting told the stories of patients who carried nonviable pregnancies, endured stillbirths and died after being unable to access timely abortion care. 

Among them was Porsha Ngumezi, a mother of two who died in a Houston-area hospital after bleeding profusely from a miscarriage. Her husband, Hope Ngumezi, also participated in Wednesday’s event in D.C. 

Despite amendments to state law by Texas legislators that were supported by the state’s anti-abortion advocates, patients who experience complications in their pregnancies say they continue to struggle to access care. Those who receive severe or lethal fetal diagnoses still have no recourse under the law; they must either continue their pregnancies or leave Texas to terminate for medical reasons. Anti-abortion groups oppose adding catastrophic fetal diagnoses as an exception to the state’s abortion bans; instead, they advocate for palliative care. 

Earlier this week, a Texas woman filed complaints with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Texas Medical Board and the Texas Board of Nursing alleging that two Round Rock hospitals provided insufficient care when she was miscarrying in October. In her federal complaint, Lynn Callaway said she visited three emergency rooms and made numerous calls to her OB-GYN before receiving misoprostol, a pill that is used for medical abortions and to aid the completion of a miscarriage. She developed an infection and, months later, when she began to heavily bleed again, was found to have retained tissue from the pregnancy, the complaint said. 

Callaway’s case unfolded after enactment of the 2025 Life of the Mother Act, a law that clarified when Texas medical providers can intervene to provide medically necessary care, including during pregnancy losses. 

O’Donnell said state law has long made the distinction between medical care for miscarriages and abortions. There is “no reason,” she said, that Texas doctors cannot provide patients like Callaway with the standard of care. 

Seago said Callaway’s case is indicative of the ongoing implementation of the Life of the Mother Act, which includes continuing education requirements for Texas physicians and attorneys on the state’s abortion laws. Failing to provide care that is legal, he said, is no different from any other type of medical malpractice. 

“That education effort for doctors is still being rolled out, and that’s critical,” he said. “Because when you look at these stories, they’re completely misrepresenting the law, they’re not following the law, and doctors need to be held accountable.” 

For some Texas women, stories such as Callaway’s have instilled a fear of becoming pregnant in Texas. Women who have become pregnant again after being affected by Texas’ abortion bans have said they felt stress, fear and anxiety during those pregnancies. A study of more than 4,300 Texas mothers published last week by medical researchers also identified an increase in reports of fair or poor mental health following the 2021 implementation of the Texas Heartbeat Act, which banned abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. A growing body of medical literature has identified other negative health outcomes for Texas mothers and babies under the state’s abortion bans. 

That law directly impacted the medical care of Brandt, who in mid-2022 learned that one of the identical twin girls she was carrying had acrania, where some or all of a fetus’ skull is missing. If the pregnancy continued without intervention, Brandt was at greater risk of premature labor, placental abruption, hemorrhage and infection. The baby would die soon after birth even if she made it to term.

The other twin, who was unaffected and healthy, had an expected survival rate of at least 97% so long as a fetal reduction was performed before 16 weeks of gestation. In such cases, the dead fetus is reabsorbed, allowing the pregnancy to continue normally. 

Brandt’s doctors told her that the 15-minute procedure could no longer be performed in Texas due to state law. Instead, they frantically did their own research to identify an out-of-state provider and arranged for family members to care for their son while they traveled. One of the doctors who treated Brandt in Colorado was also from Texas. 

The Brandts moved to Frisco six weeks after their daughter was born. The couple previously had always intended to have three children. After their experiences with Texas law, they decided they would no longer have any more children. Later, when Brandt joined the lawsuit challenging Texas’ abortion laws, attorneys representing the state told her that her choice to stop having children precluded her from having standing in the case. 

“It’s ruining the medical culture in Texas,” Brandt said. “You are pregnant, you experience a complication, and you go from being a patient to a legal liability.” 

Two other North Texas women who traveled to Capitol Hill this week self-managed abortions after suffering from mental health crises, which are not acknowledged in Texas’ abortion laws. O’Donnell and Seago said there are other ways besides abortion to support pregnant women with serious mental health concerns. 

Lelani Russell, a Dallas mother of two, was eight months postpartum when she discovered she was pregnant again in late 2022. The news filled her with dread. She was already struggling to work night shifts and care for two children while suffering from severe postpartum depression. She had also recently lost her grandmother and brother, who was murdered in Silsbee, near Beaumont.

“I didn’t want to be here anymore,” she said. 

Russell felt like she needed to make a choice between the prospect of another baby and the children she already had. She chose her children. 

After taking the medication that ended her pregnancy, Russell, who has chronic anemia, bled for weeks. At one point, she said, it was so bad that it had dripped into her shoes. She considered going to the hospital but didn’t know what would happen or who might get in trouble if she did. She said she feels lucky that she was able to recover at home. 
 
Maleeha Usman Aziz faced a similar dilemma when she became pregnant in early 2021. While Texas would not enact a restrictive abortion ban until later that year, the Allen woman had already been impacted by the state’s climate around abortion. 

Aziz has been pregnant three times, and each time she has suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum, an extreme form of pregnancy sickness. 

The first time, more than a decade ago, she was so sick that she decided to have an abortion. But she was on birth control, so she did not know how far along she was. Aziz, who had recently immigrated from Pakistan, ended up seeking an ultrasound at a crisis pregnancy center, where staff erroneously told her that abortion pills were dangerous and had been banned in Texas. She flew to Colorado Springs to end her pregnancy, only realizing after she arrived that she had been misled. 

Aziz’s second pregnancy in 2019 was barely survivable. She vomited more than a dozen times a day, even with medication that cost $600 a month, and lost consciousness multiple times. She frequently ended up in the hospital and missed work. Much of her time was spent on the bathroom floor. 

There were many moments where she said she felt like she could not go on. She thought about killing herself. When she finally gave birth, she said it was a relief. 

When she fell pregnant again about a year later, she had the same symptoms. But this time, she had a 1-year-old in her care. She had to call her husband, who was on active duty in the military, to come home when she was unable to crawl from the bathroom to her daughter’s room. 

Aziz wanted to enjoy her daughter’s childhood, she said, not just survive it. She ended her pregnancy at home with the help of an abortion doula. 

In the time Aziz has lived in Texas, she said, the state’s abortion policies have gone “from bad to worse.” Federal lawmakers, she said, need to listen, to do something. 

“People who want to be parents are suffering,” she said. “It makes everybody unsafe.”