On Saturday morning, as Republicans in the state Capitol advanced a redrawn congressional district map that would disempower minority voices in the U.S. House next year, U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, hosted a field hearing for local residents to testify about how they nearly didn’t survive being denied abortion health care in Texas.
The juxtaposition of the special session redistricting and the hearing felt stark. At the Capitol, the arguments of protesters against the racistly drawn lines were actively ignored out of the gates. Three blocks away, in the Travis County Commissioners Court, Mayor Pro Tem Vanessa Fuentes, state Rep. Donna Howard, state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, and Rep. Doggett were taking the time to listen to health care providers and patients directly harmed by those lawmakers’ decisions.
“As we meet, the House Redistricting Committee is meeting with the question of whether five pro-choice members of Congress are replaced with five anti-choice today,” Doggett said, opening the hearing.
The hearing, hosted by Free & Just, an advocate organization for reproductive freedom, was an edition of their Summer Storytelling Series in the nation’s capital, intending to give a face to how denying abortion care endangers mothers, children, and families. While cathartic, the hearing also felt somewhat like preaching to the choir (being the already pro-choice Austin Democrats). The Republican lawmakers in the Capitol actively considering bills to further restrict abortion access this special session aren’t hearing these stories. “Why is it that this can only be done on a Saturday morning, in a more informal setting, rather than over at the state Capitol or in the United States Congress?” Rep. Doggett emphasized. “People have tried to tell their stories in these institutions … and they cannot be heard.”
Gov. Greg Abbott made Senate Bill 8 law in 2021, making abortion illegal after six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant. The criminalized abortive drugs (mifepristone and misoprostol) and procedures are used in many lifesaving medical procedures even beyond abortion, especially for the one in five pregnancies that end in miscarriage, which often require similar care.
“I place the blame squarely on the state of Texas.” – Kyleigh Thurman, a fourth-generation Texan who suffered terrifying blood loss
Abbott now seeks to further tighten access to reproductive health care during the special session. Texas lawmakers are considering bills such as HB 37, further criminalizing the distribution of abortion-inducing drugs, and HB 70, making it illegal to help a minor travel out-of-state for an abortion.
During the regular session, Republicans passed SB 31 in May, known as the Life of the Mother bill, which clarifies the medical exceptions of the near-total abortion ban for physicians. Nonetheless, “Texans know bullshit when we see it,” Blair Wallace of the ACLU said. “The only real solution is a full repeal of Texas’ abortion ban.”
Of course, the currently considered Texas bills come at the same time as Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which bans the use of Medicaid insurance at Planned Parenthood and other health care nonprofits that provide legal abortion access. Planned Parenthood and Maine Family Planning are suing the federal government. “The Big Ugly Bill, as we call it, threatens bodily autonomy and women’s financial independence,” Doggett said.
Kyleigh Thurman, a fourth-generation Texan from Burnet, had an ectopic pregnancy in her fallopian tube and had been bleeding for weeks. At the field hearing, Thurman said ER doctors repeatedly gaslit her about her symptoms and told her she was having a miscarriage, likely to avoid giving her the needed drug, methotrexate, to dissolve the pregnancy. If an ectopic pregnancy isn’t removed, it can be fatal from the fallopian tube rupturing and the internal hemorrhage that will follow. Thurman was told to put a heating pad on her rupturing fallopian tube. A few days later, she suffered a hemorrhage.
She immediately almost fainted from the blood loss. “But somehow I determined, in that moment, I would stay conscious and fight. I knew if I passed out, I would die. And I wasn’t going to let that happen,” Thurman said. “I fought like hell … that kickass cowgirl fight. I just had it.”
“I place the blame squarely on the state of Texas,” Thurman pressed, through her tears. “I pray, almost daily, that those individuals are made aware of and are unable to run and hide from the suffering that they have caused.”
Taylor Edwards told the room that she was forced to carry her baby, whose brain tissue was developing outside of the skull, in her womb for two weeks. Even with the certainty that her baby would die, she was denied abortion care in Texas. “I struggled every single day,” Edwards said. “I woke up every morning not wanting to be alive anymore.”
She tried New Mexico, sick and grieving, and eventually was only able to schedule the abortion appointment in Colorado. “I felt like a criminal under constant surveillance, worried I’d be arrested or a bounty would be put on my husband once we arrived home,” Edwards said.
Another speaker, Kaitlyn Kash, had finally welcomed her second child into the world but the placenta would not deliver. Her doctor needed to perform a dilation and curettage (D&C) to remove it from the uterus. It was a life-or-death emergency, but the doctor delayed. Kash began profusely bleeding and nearly died. “I remember thinking, I will never get to meet my daughter,” she said. Another mother later spoke about how, without abortion care, her children today would have been orphaned.
Rep. Howard emphasized that all of these situations were “absolutely preventable,” and yet nearly killed the women gathered.
Howard also pointed out that during legislative sessions, public testimony is usually brutal and brief. Lawmakers often cut speakers off.
“I think it’s extremely important that we have forums where these stories can be told, where voices can be heard, especially when they’re cut off in the legislative process,” Rep. Howard said after the hearing. “We do not have enough opportunities to hear the stories about how these laws are really impacting people.”
This article appears in August 8 • 2025.