‘They forced me to carry my baby to the end’: women of color on being denied abortion
Pregnancy has long been riskier than abortion in America. About 650-750 US women die during pregnancy each year, the highest maternal death rate in the industrialized world.
Comparatively, very few women die from abortion or suffer complications: two women died from abortion complications in 2018. So, when Roe v Wade was overturned last summer, there were fears that deaths and complications from pregnancy would shoot up – particularly among women of color.
Black women were 2.6 times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts in 2021 according to CDC analysis. Structural racism, Medicaid coverage and a failure to properly invest in maternal healthcare all contribute to this. Black women report being dismissed, overlooked and ignored during childbirth and by the medical institution generally when it comes to maternal care.
After Roe v Wade was overturned, it was mostly states in the south and the midwest that banned abortion immediately. These states have the largest shares of women of color living in them. Women of color are also more likely to have abortions – Black women were almost four times as likely as white women to get an abortion in 2020; Latina women were almost twice as likely. This could be for a whole host of reasons: women of color generally earn a fraction of what their white counterparts earn; they are more likely to live in states where contraception is hard to access; and Black women, specifically, are more prone to miscarriage.
Here are two stories of women of color who had to navigate their pregnancies after being denied an abortion in post-Roe America.
Anya Cook
It was the first week that Anya Cook, 36, felt comfortable going out as a fully fledged pregnant person. She was well into her second trimester – 16 weeks – but having suffered 17 miscarriages in two years, she had learned not to get hopeful too early. In December 2022, her city of Coral Springs, Florida, was having its annual parade. Cook felt cute in her two-piece biker-short set as she watched children stuff their faces with ice creams, while parents cheered on the marching band from the sidelines.
Leaving a restaurant later that evening, Cook felt a wet rush down her legs, like someone had thrown a glass of water on her. On the way to the hospital with her husband, Derick, she hoped that even if her water had broken, she could get a small stitch and continue with a healthy pregnancy.
When Cook got to the ER, as far as she could see, no one had been shot, or was in need of urgent care. But over the next hour, she would learn how it felt to be invisible. The receptionist told Cook no beds were available, although Cook believes she saw many sitting empty. People turned their heads away as Cook squirmed uncomfortably in a wheelchair, amniotic fluid gushing between her legs. “Mommy, what happened to her?” she heard a small boy visiting the ER ask. The boy’s mother shushed him.
Soon, Cook would find out. Her water had indeed broken early, and there was no stitch that could reverse it. In the next 48 hours, she would deliver and her fetus would not survive.
Cook would be sent home, to deliver on her own. Because the doctors could still see a fetal heartbeat on the ultrasound, she couldn’t have an abortion, even though they knew 16 weeks was too early for it to survive. And because Cook was not yet in a life-threatening situation, the doctors couldn’t intervene to save her.
“I said, ‘Let me guess. Is it because of Roe v Wade’?” says Cook by phone interview.
The doctor confirmed it was.
Cook left the hospital certain of her fate that evening. After scouring the internet to learn about PPROM – pre
term premature rupture of the membranes – she was sure she was going to die: complications from PPROM can include serious infection and hemorrhage.
Cook booked an appointment at the salon the next morning to have her hair done, ready for her casket. She and Derick argued all the way there. He couldn’t believe she was giving up.
Cook delivered her daughter, who she named Bunny, a few hours later, in the salon toilet. In the small, sterile-smelling room, she sat on the toilet with Derick between her legs, and tried to direct him, telling him to remove the cord and help her deliver her placenta, based on things she had seen on TV.
One of the clients in the salon that day was a nurse. When she saw Cook, she spoke with urgency: Cook was hemorrhaging and needed to get to the hospital, stat.
Cook remembers feeling dismissed and questioned when she arrived at the hospital. “The paramedics told them I was bleeding out,” says Cook. Still, she says she was asked by nurses and doctors several times if she was OK before being rushed for treatment.
In the end, to be taken seriously, Cook says she opened her legs. “I literally just released my body and blood. Like a pipe that burst in your kitchen, blood – gushing, shooting out,” explains
Cook. “I said, now do you believe me?”
She woke up the next day, having lost almost half of the blood in her body. Lasting damage to the blood vessels around her uterus may make it even harder for her to get pregnant again.
Asked if she believes race was a factor in her care, Cook says yes.
“If I was Ron DeSantis’s wife, I would have gotten the care I needed, right there in that very moment,” she said – referring to the night when she first arrived in the ER.
DeSantis recently signed off on a six-week abortion ban in the state, which will make it even harder for people to get abortion care in Florida in the future.
“[Would] the governor’s wife wait for a bed, or go home to deliver when they know her baby won’t survive? Oh, no. That would have not happened. I don’t lose sight on that, ever,” Cook says.
Samantha Casiano
Deep breaths. That’s how Samantha Casiano, 29, got through the 13 weeks between finding out her fetus was going to be born with half a skull and wouldn’t live long after birth; and knowing she couldn’t get an abortion in Texas anyway.
She had gone home after being told the news and searched the internet for what to do. There were abortion clinics in New Mexico and Colorado, but Casiano immediately felt stupid for having looked. Where was she going to get the money to hire a rental car and drive out of state for three days to get an abortion? And who was going to look after her five children while she went? Her paychecks barely made up $1,200 a fortnight.
Frightened, she deleted her search history and removed the idea of escape from her mind.
Casiano spent the next few weeks feeling like a prisoner trapped in her own body. With the growing kicks and pains that accompanied her pregnancy, she felt reminded that the life inside her was growing just to die. She watched, uncomfortably, as her husband increasingly convinced himself their daughter might be OK. Casiano knew the numbers. Almost all babies with anencephaly will die shortly after birth.
At 33 weeks, she hopped atop her brother-in-law’s grey truck with her husband, clutching her stomach as they headed down the road from her trailer to the hospital. It was time.
The doctors had been adamant that Casiano had to continue her pregnancy as though her fetus would survive since they diagnosed anencephaly at 20 weeks. But now she was about to deliver, she realized their pro-life stance would only last the duration of her pregnancy. They had no intention of treating her like someone whose baby was going to live during the birth.
Casiano’s fetus was breech – feet first – for which people are usually offered a C-section, to prevent a more painful delivery. Delivering breech can result in the baby’s head getting stuck on the way out; asphyxiation; and the pelvis seizing. Casiano was offered no monitor to see how her fetus was doing during the birth. “They kept telling me, if this was a normal healthy baby things would be different, but yours is going to pass,” says Casiano. “I felt like I’d been invited to a birthday party, where no one turns up, and no gifts are given.”
Her daughter, Halo, died four short hours after birth.
Casiano spent the next two nights sleeping on the ward of the hospital while she recovered, listening to new parents being united with their children. When she left, the doctors sent her walking out the front doors, instead of gently carting her out in a wheelchair as they do for the mothers leaving the hospital with their newborns. “I felt so degraded,” says Casiano. “It’s like they forced me to carry my baby to the end, but when the time came, they were like ‘OK, let’s get this over with.’”
Casiano is suing the state of Texas alongside 14 other plaintiffs for being denied access to life-saving abortion care. The lawyers representing her have noted that a white plaintiff in the case with the same diagnosis as Casiano was told to go out of state to get care, but Casiano’s treatment was very different.
“When she asked what her options were, her doctor said, ‘You don’t have any. You need to carry this pregnancy to term. They wouldn’t even show her the ultrasound,” says Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights.
“There could be many reasons for that. But these themes of abortion laws and discrimination and institutionalized racism … it is borne out by real people’s experiences,” she says.
The lawyers also note how Casiano has been singled out in the case.
Casiano could not afford to pay for her daughter’s funeral, or a headstone for her grave, until a GoFundMe page she set up went viral. Recently, the state of Texas filed a motion to have the case dismissed, linking to Casiano’s GoFundMe in the motion, and accusing her of going on a $50,000 “media tour”, with her abortion story.
But Casiano is adamant she will continue speaking out.
“I do it because other women might not be as social as me, or as able as me, to say what they have gone through, and how they feel,” says Casiano.
“If I saw somebody else going through what I went through, I would be like: ‘How are you doing this? Nobody should have to do that’,” she says.
The people on that boat weren’t statistics, though. They were human beings who deserve better. They deserve better than being lumped together under the term “migrants”. A term that, the Guardian noted in a recent editorial, “disguises rather than illuminates the individuals behind the label”. They deserve the same sort of resources and attention and empathy that five rich adventurers, who put themselves in harm’s way for the fun of it, rather than because they were desperate for a better life, have had.
Here’s the thing: unless I’ve severely underestimated the number of billionaires with a death wish, I think this is the last story we’re going to see about obscenely rich people going missing in a submersible for quite a while. But I’m afraid I can almost guarantee we’re going to see plenty more stories about ships carrying migrants capsizing.
If anything good can come of these two tragedies, I hope it’s that it makes more people rethink how we value human lives. I hope it makes it uncomfortably clear that, in the eyes of the media and policymakers, one missing billionaire is seemingly more important than hundreds of missing migrants.
I hope it makes us consider the framing around the story of migrant crossings. I hope it makes more people interrogate the ways in which migrants are blamed for their deaths, blamed for seeking out better lives – and how completely different that is from the empathy afforded to millionaires seeking out underwater thrills.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
brace of medals. As a two-decade BJJ bro with a handful of amateur MMA fights under my own (black) belt, I know how difficult that is. Even if you’re hiring the best coaches in the world, you still have to do the work to get better, and there is (I’m assuming) no level of wealth that makes it feel better when another man grinds his shoulder into your face.
Competing is even scarier. Though serious injuries in the sport are reasonably rare, you’re essentially daring random strangers to hyperextend your joints and squeeze your carotid arteries shut every time you have a match, and some of them are really, really good at it. That Zuckerberg is giving it a go, when he could probably just pay 100 bodyguards to follow him everywhere for the rest of his life, shows a humility and willingness to embrace the beginner mind that you have to admire, even if you’ve seen The Social Network. Besides, a billionaire paying some of the world’s best grapplers to turn him into a fighting machine is so comic-book that, as a nerd, I’m honour-bound to respect it. I hope he builds an anti-Superman suit next.
This, I think, is also why I’m a bit disappointed in Musk. His fans refer to him as a real-life Iron Man Tony Stark: a
A billionaire paying the world’s best grapplers to turn him into a fighting machine is so comicbook that I’ve got to respect it
self-made, self-taught billionaire who’s an expert in everything from rocketry to neural enhancement. He is supposed to be the pinnacle of the productivity bro pyramid: a perfectly optimised guy who sleeps for six hours a night and spends his days nudging humanity towards its next evolutionary phase. Unfortunately, every time he tweets, he unpicks this image just a little bit: a meme when he could be developing interplanetary travel here, a dad joke when he could be welding together his own rocket boots there. Tony Stark, let’s not forget, can actually do wing chun. Musk refers to his own fighting style as “the walrus” – “I just lie on you.”
Ultimately, though, neither billionaire comes out of this very well, because – as you might remember from school, or the 1989 movie Road House – fighting doesn’t really prove anything. Recently, it’s become de rigueur for ideological opponents to offer each other out for a scrap, perhaps because being Good At Fighting – having the dedication to endure endless training sessions or the willpower to take a solid punch and keep going – feels like a proxy for other worthwhile qualities.
But – here’s the thing – it really isn’t. I could probably beat up 99% of the people I disagree with on Twitter, but that doesn’t make me more qualified than they are to opine on the housing crisis. Conversely, I’ve been beaten up by plenty of people, and half of them were even less informed than me.
So, Elon, Mark, by all means keep up the competitiveness – it’s a healthy quality. But could I humbly suggest that the real tussle should be to see who can fix the climate crisis the hardest? Anyone, after all, can climb into a cage – but it’s going to take a Tony Stark or a Lex Luthor to sort out the rest of the planet.
• Joel Snape is a writer and fitness expert