Amanda Zurawski never set out to be an activist. But in 2022, when she was four months pregnant after years of trying, her life changed forever. She dilated too early, her water broke at just 18 weeks, and suddenly, her pregnancy was in distress. Zurawski’s doctors told her “with complete certainty” that she would lose the baby.
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If Zurawski, now 37, had lived in another state, or in another time, her doctors would’ve been able to give her standard medical treatment, in this case an abortion. She would’ve been able to heal and go on to have a healthy pregnancy. But Zurawski lived in Texas in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Her water broke the same week that Texas’ trigger law went into effect, banning abortion in almost all circumstances.
Because her fetus still had a heartbeat, her doctors could not treat her miscarriage. “I had to wait until the baby died inside me or for me to be on death’s door before I could get care,” she says. She went into septic shock and was hospitalized for a week. “Now my reproductive organs are permanently compromised,” she says.
After sharing her story publicly, Zurawski became the lead plaintiff in the Center for Reproductive Rights’ lawsuit challenging Texas’s abortion ban. That lawsuit, Zurawski v. Texas, inspired others around the country. Zurawski became the face of the abortion-rights movement, and her story became one of the most prominent examples of the dangers abortion bans pose to women’s health.
In May 2024 the Texas Supreme Court upheld the ban. The decision felt like “a slap in the face,” Zurawski recalls. “It felt like they were trying to take away our voices, erase us from history, and silence us.”
Zurawski refused to back down. She made dozens of campaign trips for President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris over the course of 2024, warning about the dangers another Donald Trump presidency would pose to reproductive justice.
After Harris lost, Zurawski was devastated. But she didn’t let herself wallow for long. “The anti-choice movement would want us to be tired, they’d want us to rest,” she says. “It’s not in my nature to give up. It can get worse, and it will, if we don’t continue to fight.”
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