Amanda Zurawski needed to go for a run. It had been a busy day; Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was in Austin and asked for time with the plaintiffs in Zurawski v. Texas, the 2023 lawsuit alleging that the vagueness of the medical exemption in Texas’s abortion ban was endangering the lives of women. That evening, a documentary based on the case would be screening downtown, and afterward Zurawski would be onstage as part of a panel discussing the film. Her schedule left no time to take out her sheepadoodle Millie, and the dog was getting antsy. So while talking with me on the phone, the spritely 37-year-old ran the 5k she’d mapped out around her Austin neighborhood. She is a high-profile advocate, but she’s also a former middle school and high school teacher who likes to take her dog on a run. She’s an average Texan, and not, as one online troll alleged, a Canadian actress hired to fake a near-death experience as part of a pro-abortion agenda.
She said teaching preteens prepared her for the absurd animosity she would face after coming forward with her story. But she’s no longer alone. Dozens of women have shared their own tragedies and near-misses over the nineteen months since she filed the lawsuit, and now too many Texans know someone who has been affected. “These are not one-off stories. These are not small numbers.”
Texas’s near-total abortion ban has created a new and growing cadre of activists: grieving parents. As more of them speak out about their horrific experiences and push for policy change, they’re finding that the shift from grief to activist can quickly turn the response from empathy to disbelief and hostility.
Ryan Hamilton has spent the last five months living in that embattled public space. The musician and radio DJ resides in North Texas, and in May, his wife nearly bled to death after being sent home from the hospital while having an incomplete miscarriage—in which the body cannot expel the tissue on its own. The first emergency room doctor prescribed misoprostol—a drug that is also used in medical abortions—to help manage the miscarriage, but warned them it may take more than one try. The next day, seeing no progress, Hamilton took his wife back to the emergency room where, even with no fetal heartbeat, a different attending doctor refused to offer more medication, citing Texas’s abortion ban. “Considering the stance, I’m not going to prescribe you this pill,” Hamilton remembers the doctor saying. At a second hospital, doctors decided that her situation was not yet dire enough to perform a dilation and curettage—a medical procedure, also used in abortions, that surgically removes the tissue from the uterus. They prescribed a stronger dose of the medication, and sent the couple home again.
Neither of the hospitals responded to requests for an interview on how the law affected the treatment they prescribed. But Texas doctors, including those who joined Zurawski’s lawsuit, have said that obstetric care in general is more difficult under the strict ban. In her portion of the complaint in Zurawski v. Texas, coplaintiff Dr. Judy Levison claimed that doctors feel targeted by the law and that “widespread fear and confusion regarding the scope of Texas’s abortion bans has chilled the provision of the standard of practice of obstetric care.”
Shortly after returning home the third time, Hamilton found his wife unconscious in a pool of her own blood. They managed to get her to the hospital in time to save her life, but the experience left Hamilton outraged. He took to social media to tell their story and was swept into the furor of abortion politics. He asked that I not include his wife’s name in this story because with every fresh publication comes another wave of vitriol. They live in a small town, which he also asked me not to name because sometimes the threats of physical violence via email and social media seem credible. He’s trying to keep his wife and toddler safe. But what he can’t do, he said, is be silent. “The hate and the blowback and these crazy people coming after me and attacking my wife, the baby we lost, that is the ultimate ironic reason I wanted to keep going. Because of these hateful, ignorant people,” Hamilton said.
Political discourse on social media has become so vicious that researchers have studied it as a social phenomenon. In 2018 a paper presented at the tenth International Conference on Social Informatics discussed the need to define and study “vitriol” as a unique kind of online behavior “distinct from hate speech and bullying.”
Hamilton has become all too familiar with the idiosyncrasies of online harassment. “Take the most horrible thing you can think of someone saying in this situation and bump it up a few notches.” One post on X, one of the only ones he’s gone back and deleted, he said, got retweeted in Christian nationalist circles, resulting in a flood of violent responses. “Kill a commie for Christ” was the reply that sticks out most to him. He’s still regularly accused of lying or being a paid actor. Under his initial post telling the story of their miscarriage emergency, one user simply replied, “BS Fiction” and another replied, ”Yours is another false story meant to enrage people supporting abortion rights.”
Accusing parents of being “crisis actors” when they’re advocating for policy is not new. Most famously, right-wing radio show host Alex Jones claimed that the 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, was a hoax. Jones was later ordered by courts to pay over $1 billion in damages to the grieving families. Why do similar conspiracy theories persist, particularly on social media? “People are most vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking when trying to explain unusual and unsettling events,” concluded Texas State University researchers Madison Doyle and M. Hunter Martaindale in a recent study of conspiracy theory posts following the Uvalde massacre. The pair built on previous research that indicates an audience is more likely to believe testimony is fake if they also believe the messenger is immoral. Given the morality claims surrounding abortion discourse, particularly in Texas, even grieving parents who blame policy for their suffering can be branded as untrusted messengers; unsettling stories can quickly become targets.
Whatever misery Zurwaski and Hamilton experience online, however, is now just part of a longer painful chapter. They live, and might live forever, at the intersection of grief and rage familiar to parents in “the club nobody wants to belong to,” as Zurawski has described it. (Parents of Uvalde victims have described their solidarity to me in the same way.) Talking to journalists and politicians is Zurwaski’s full-time job these days, but it’s not one she ever would have chosen. If she had her choice, she’d be chasing her daughter Willow, who would be a toddler by now if everything hadn’t gone horribly wrong in the fall of 2022.
Zurawski had been undergoing fertility treatments for over a year. She and her husband Josh were elated when she became pregnant in 2022. But shortly after a flurry of joyful social media announcements, she began to miscarry at seventeen and a half weeks. It was the end of a dream and, though they didn’t know it yet, the beginning of a dystopian journey. Doctors at the hospital told them that miscarriage was inevitable. But since the baby still had a heartbeat, there was nothing the doctors could do but wait. Texas’s near-total abortion ban was newly secured, thanks to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision from the U.S. Supreme Court months prior. So even though Zurawski quickly learned that her condition—preterm prelabor rupture of membranes—was dangerous to her own health, her lawsuit claims that “the hospital was concerned that providing an abortion without signs of acute infection may not fall within the Emergent Medical Condition Exception in Texas’s abortion bans.” Violation of the ban could mean prison time or loss of the doctor’s medical licenses. More than a year later, Zurawski would testify in a district courtroom about the horror of listening to her daughter’s heartbeat, both desperate to hear it and fearful of what would happen if it didn’t stop soon.
The hospital sent her home and after two days of waiting, she began to shake uncontrollably and run a high fever, signs she was going into septic shock. She and her husband rushed back to the hospital, where she stayed in the ICU for three days while doctors fought an infection. She emerged from the hospital with a collapsed fallopian tube and reconstructed uterus, dramatically reducing the likelihood that she would ever carry a pregnancy. Almost immediately, she said, she and Josh knew that they needed to say something. “People were going to die,” she told me. The Center for Reproductive Rights heard about Zurawski and approached her about filing a lawsuit based on the vagueness of the medical emergency exemption. Others quickly signed on as coplaintiffs; eventually nineteen women affected by the ban would join, as well as two ob-gyns. “After we filed Zurawski v. Texas, the calls and emails flooded in from other women saying, ‘This happened to me too,’ ” said Molly Duane, a senior staff attorney with the Center. “I’ve spoken with dozens of them, and hundreds more people from the country have reached out to us with offers of solidarity and support.”
As legal proceedings began, the social media siege became less of a focus for Zurwaski and she began to identify her primary antagonists as lawmakers intent on preserving the bans in their most stringent forms. She told me she knew the legal case would be an uphill battle, but still, she’d been hopeful. “Either we win the case, which is great, or we lose the case, but hopefully make enough noise that people are outraged that the state won’t help its pregnant citizens, and that could spark into action on a larger scale.”
She was correct about the uphill battle. The Texas Supreme Court ruled against Zurawski and her coplaintiffs. But the noise by then was significant: the online maelstrom amplified their stories and emboldened others to go public with their own. Lawsuits followed in other states, and more women and partners affected, such as Hamilton, began speaking out about their losses. The United States Senate Judiciary Committee invited Zurawski to share her story, and both First Lady Jill Biden and Congresswoman Katherine Clark of Massachusetts invited her to State of the Union addresses in 2023 and 2024. Kate Cox, who sued the state of Texas while she was pregnant and in need of an abortion to protect her health, spoke on behalf of the Texas delegation at the Democratic National Convention. “That’s the power of their stories,” Duane said.
Support has come from a broader swath than one might expect. Longtime advocates of abortion rights, such as Hillary and Chelsea Clinton (who also produced a documentary about Zurawski’s case), have spoken up alongside those whose position on abortion has moved in part because of the stories of haunted parents and partners who are turning anguish into advocacy. “I’ve been witness to people changing their minds. I have countless emails and Twitter messages,” Hamilton said. “If the support didn’t heavily outweigh the hate, I’m not sure I could do it.”
Hamilton and Zurawski are both committed to the legal and political battles ahead, but they are also aware that part of that work happens in real relationships. “The conversations we have at home are just as impactful, if not more so than what we say in public,” Zurawski said. She’s always had the support of her family, but she’s also been moved by how many of her friends who would describe themselves as “pro-life” have reconsidered their position because of her story.
Hamilton said that of the devoted anti-abortion rights voters and advocates, he sees very few individuals changing their minds, but when it does happen, “It is always the wife, the daughter, or the sister, that sits a male figure in their life down and says, ‘I want to show you something.’ ”
