“Go home and wait for the fetus to die inside you,” was the advice Elizabeth Weller received from her doctors, who feared violating Texas’ six-week abortion ban.
NPR reports the story of Weller, a Texas Woman, who had to bring her own foul discharge into the hospital to prove that an infection was killing her so that a panel of doctors would agree to terminate her lethal pregnancy.
Weller’s story demonstrates the danger all women are in as they have to fight for their lives due to tyrannical abortion bans.
In May, Weller was 18 weeks along in a pregnancy she very much wanted, when her water broke, leaving her without amniotic fluid to carry the pregnancy. She was told the fetus would likely die, or would have to fight for his life in an agonizing way. So, she and her husband decided an abortion was the safest and most humane option.
However, one other problem persisted, the fetus still had a heartbeat, which made her Houston-area doctors decide an abortion was not yet an option – so as to not violate Texas’ six-week abortion ban.
Weller was also starting to experience symptoms of chorioamnionitis, which can lead to a fatal infection. So they told her to either wait at the hospital to get sick enough to warrant a “medical emergency,” per the exception in the Texas law, or go home and wait for her fetus to die inside her, as reported by Jezebel.
Weller was sent home to fight for her life as her baby was dying inside her.
She had cramps, and was passing clots of blood. Her discharge was yellow and smelled bad. But the hospital staff told her those weren’t the right symptoms. Weller was to wait until she had a fever of 100.4 degrees, chills, and most importantly, her discharge had to smell so foul, enough to make her hurl.
Eventually, it did.
She brought a sample of it back to the hospital to prove the infection was killing her.
“Because I didn’t want anybody to tell me they did not believe me,” she told NPR. “And if they didn’t believe me, I was going to show it to them and say, ‘Look! You open it. You smell it yourself. You’re not going to tell me that what I’m experiencing isn’t real, again.’”
At the very last minute, Weller was finally granted a life-saving abortion.
But her case is not an isolated incident.
Just a few weeks back, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration over federal rules that require abortions be provided in medical emergencies to save the life of the mother.
“President Biden is flagrantly disregarding the legislative and democratic process—and flouting the Supreme Court’s ruling before the ink is dry—by having his appointed bureaucrats mandate that hospitals and emergency medicine physicians must perform abortions,” the lawsuit said.
The “pro-life” Republican leaders in the state are being clear about the fact they would rather see pregnant people die than loosen their new abortion restrictions.
The dystopian stories that have surfaced in this post-Roe reality have made it clear: women will suffer and die from abortion bans.
