Living and Dying Under Dobbs, vol. 4 (no audio). Scroll down to read the stories.

Volume 4 of the ongoing textile book.

Scroll down to read the stories.

Allie Phillips learned 19 weeks into her second pregnancy that the fetus, whom she named Miley Rose, had multiple fatal conditions, including no amniotic fluid and a non-functioning bladder, kidneys, and stomach. Knowing that Miley Rose would not survive, and that her own health was at risk, Allie was forced to raise money to travel to New York because of Tennessee’s abortion ban. Since she did not want others to go through what she did, and in her daughter’s memory, Allie ran for state office in 2023 against a Republican incumbent and abortion ban supporter who said, “`I thought only first pregnancies could go bad.’” Allie’s comment: “As if our uteruses operate like a gallon of spoiled milk.” With a door-to-door campaign, and no political connections or money, Allie won 45% of the vote. “I heard people, I connected with them,” Allie says, “and I gave voters a choice, something Tennessee stole from me.”

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Georgia obstetrician Lara Hart arrived at the hospital to discover a patient with sepsis in the ICU on a ventilator. The woman’s water broke too early in pregnancy, but doctors had hesitated to perform the standard treatment, a D&C, because of the state abortion ban. The patient began to hemorrhage so heavily that Dr. Hart performed a hysterectomy, a procedure she believed was avoidable. “I shouldn’t be here doing this,” she thought. “This should have been taken care of a week ago before she was so sick.” Some states’ abortion bans supposedly have exceptions that cover situations when patients’ life or health is at risk, but individual patients’ circumstances are often not clear-cut and can change quickly. “In obstetrics, there is an inch of black and an inch of white and, like a thousand yards of gray,” Dr. Hart said.

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At the age of 41, Candi Miller found herself unintentionally pregnant. Doctors warned after her third child that her life would be endangered by a future pregnancy, because she had diabetes, hypertension, and lupus. Candi obtained abortion medication, but was too frightened to go to the hospital when the abortion did not complete. Georgia’s abortion ban says women cannot be charged with a crime for self-managed abortions, but her family believed otherwise. “If you get caught trying to do anything to get rid of the baby,” her son said, “you get jail time for that.” On Nov. 12, 2022, Candi died at home. Georgia’s maternal mortality review board deemed it a “preventable” death, blaming the state abortion ban. Candi’s sister Turiya has joined forces with Shanette, the mother of Amber Thurman, another woman killed by Georgia’s abortion ban. Turiya and Shanette are planning to begin a podcast whose first episode will be “Sisters by Loss, Warriors by Choice.”

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In 2023, at 21 weeks of pregnancy, Brittany Watts’ placenta partially detached and her water broke. The fetus could not survive and her health was in danger. Brittany went twice to St. Joseph Warren Hospital in Ohio. She received no treatment, with no explanation, for 18 hours over two days, then miscarried at home. Still bleeding, she returned to the hospital, where a nurse called the police, who searched her home for the fetus. Two weeks later, Brittany was arrested, handcuffed, and charged with abuse of a corpse. She faced a year in prison but three months later a grand jury concluded there was no evidence she had committed a crime. In January 2025, she filed a federal lawsuit against the hospital, the city of Warren, a detective, two nurses, and two other hospital employees. “I don’t want what happened to me to ever happen to any other woman,” Brittany says. “I grew up an only child, but I have hundreds of thousands of sisters across the world.”

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In 2022, Lizelle Gonzalez took misoprostol, then went to a South Texas ER where she had a C-section to deliver a stillborn fetus. The hospital reported her to the police. She was indicted for murder at the instigation of DA Gocha Ramirez, then released from jail after three days when the half million dollar bond was posted and charges were dropped. While jailed, she had a panic attack so severe she had to be hospitalized. Lizelle has sued because Ramirez pursued a murder charge even though self-managed abortion is not a crime. While she was jailed, Ramirez texted friends that he was concerned he had wrongly charged her and might lose his job. One person he texted was a woman with whom he had a long-term extramarital affair. She reminded him that he had paid for her sister’s abortion of his child, also the result of an extramarital affair. After her sister’s abortion, he took them both out to lunch at a Red Lobster restaurant.

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In 2022, Texan Elizabeth Weller was pregnant with her first child when her water broke prematurely at 18 weeks. The lack of amniotic fluid meant that the fetus was almost certain to die before or shortly after birth, but its heartbeat meant that all Elizabeth could do was wait to become ill enough for an abortion. Hospital staff told her to await symptoms of a uterine infection: a fever over 100 degrees, chills, and dark discharge that smelled so foul it made her retch. After several days, Elizabeth began to experience these symptoms so she and her husband returned to the ER with a Ziploc bag containing a bit of toilet paper with a sample of the discharge. “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." By the time she arrived, a medical ethics board had determined that she could be induced that night. Elizabeth birthed a stillborn girl.