As voters head to the ballot box to vote for the very leaders who will directly decide their reproductive healthcare access, the documentary Zurawski v. Texas is on national tour, screening in movie theaters across the country.
Executive produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and directed by Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, the film achieves the remarkable, bringing audiences directly into the lives of three plaintiffs and their lawyer in the groundbreaking lawsuit from the Center for Reproductive Rights challenging Texas’ abject failure to honor medical exceptions under its abortion ban. The documentary gets up close and personal, shedding light on the devastating consequences experienced by each of the women—their doctor’s appointments, family interactions, surrogacy attempts, courtroom testimonies and a heart-wrenching funeral—at the hands of the state.
The plaintiffs featured—Amanda Zurawski, Samantha Casiano and Dr. Austin Dennard—are all Texas women denied appropriate medical care in their home state, despite presenting life-threatening complications and doomed fetuses. Though each story tracks differently, the common threads are how deeply each was a wanted pregnancy—and how cruelly and dismissively the women and their families have been treated.
Zurawski endured a preterm rupture of membranes at 18 weeks leading to sepsis; Casiano and Dennard had diagnoses of anencephaly at 11 and 20 weeks, respectively. Zurawski received care only once she was near death, compromising her fertility and future ability to have children; Dennard eventually crossed state lines to access abortion care; Casiano was forced to carry a pregnancy that resulted in the inevitable death of her daughter, Halo, only four hours after giving birth.
“You think it is your pregnancy, but it is not your pregnancy. It is the state’s pregnancy,” says Dennard, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist herself, in the film. The film’s dogged exposure of a year’s worth of litigation makes that plain.
Following a screening of the documentary in New York City this weekend, viewers heard directly from Crow, a Texan herself, and Center for Reproductive Rights senior counsel Marc Hearron in a post-film panel moderated by Alissa Quart of the Economic Hardship Project.
As an audience member, I felt gutted as the cameras panned across the lifeless body of baby Halo, whose condition had caused only part of her brain to develop. Her traumatic birth, after which she suffocated to death, resulted in a blue tint to her skin and bloodied eyes. The cameras follow Halo as she is wrapped in blankets and lowered into the ground in a tiny casket the size of a shoebox.
I share these details not to sensationalize—but this image only scrapes the surface of the fear and pain pregnant women across America are now enduring. Pre-Dobbs, abortion care was far from equitable. Today’s medical exceptions maze is another level of cruelty—laws so ambiguous that doctors have zero clarity about whether they can treat their patients, even those facing nonviable and downright dangerous pregnancies. That the very condition that brings humanity into this world, pregnancy, is now potentially lethal, is an irony I can hardly fathom.
Watching the film made me feel helpless at times, wishing I could undo the injustice already experienced by these plaintiffs. But it was a call to civic power, too—especially by casting a vote in this election.
To folks of my generation: Your anger, distrust and fatigue about the state of our nation is valid. I am right there with you in the feeling that our voices are simply not heard. But we cannot accept a future where pregnancy is a potential death sentence and decisions about access to healthcare are made by political leaders who do not value our humanity.
To all the women who told their stories in this film: I will help ensure your losses will not be in vain. And to Halo: I will fight to ensure you are the last baby who will ever have to experience a life of unjust suffering.
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