Author: Martha Mendoza

Martha Mendoza is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and a one-time finalist. Her reports have prompted congressional hearings and new legislation, Pentagon investigations, and White House responses. She was part of a team whose investigations into slavery in the Thai seafood business led to the freedom of more than 2,000 men. During her Associated Press career, she’s been based in Mexico City, Bangkok, Silicon Valley, New York and New Mexico, and is currently a member of the AP’s Investigative Team. Mendoza studied journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was a Knight fellow at Stanford University, and a Ferris professor at Princeton University. In 2020 she won an Emmy for a FRONTLINE/PBS collaboration Kids Caught In The Crackdown.
From the Vault: Between a Woman and Her Doctor (Summer 2004)

Between a Woman and Her Doctor (Summer 2004)

On November 6, 2003, President Bush signed what he called a “partial birth abortion ban,” prohibiting doctors from committing an “overt act” designed to kill a partially delivered fetus. One of the unintended consequences of this new law is that it put people in my position, with a fetus already dead, in a technical limbo. 

We told our doctor we had chosen a dilation and evacuation. But I didn’t realize that pressures extending all the way to the boardrooms of hospitals, administrative sessions at medical schools and committee hearing in Congress, were going to deepen and expand my sorrow and pain.