‘I wasn’t allowed to get the healthcare I needed’: the women suing Tennessee for being denied abortions
When K Monica Kelly saw that women in Texas had filed a lawsuit challenging the contours of their state’s abortion ban, she posted on Instagram to cheer them on.
“I shared how terrible I thought it was, that they weren’t able to get the proper healthcare they needed in their state,” Kelly said. “It never crossed my mind that that was actually going to happen to me soon.”
Kelly and her husband spent a year trying to have a second baby. So when they discovered in February 2023 that Kelly was pregnant, the couple was ecstatic. They taught their son, who was then two years old, to describe their family as: “Mama, dada, me, baby, all four!” After an ultrasound looked promising, and they drove more than 10 hours from their home in northern Tennessee to announce the news to their family in Florida.
Only days later, after they’d returned home, in late March, the pair drove back to Florida. This time, though, the drive was “surreal and devastating”, Kelly said. A series of catastrophic fetal diagnoses had led Kelly to decide to get an abortion – a procedure she could not legally get in Tennessee.
“It’s awful and agonizing to just even drive that far to go do something that you just really don’t want to do,” Kelly said. “Even up until the last second, I wished that I could change my mind. But I just knew that that was the best decision.”
More than a dozen states have implemented near-total abortion bans since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022. Although every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception that should theoretically allow for abortions in medical emergencies, doctors and patients across the country have said that the bans are worded in such a way as to be unworkable in reality. Misinterpreting the exceptions could lead providers to shoulder not only hefty fines,