This story is equal parts heartwarming and rage-inducing.
One morning last spring, Hollie Cunningham’s father was drinking coffee and watching “Good Morning America” on his patio when he saw Austin Dennard, a Dallas-area OB-GYN, on the screen.
Through tears, Dennard described the devastation of having learned her pregnancy wasn’t viable. Then, she recounted the struggle of leaving Texas for an abortion the state wouldn’t allow.
It sounded all too familiar — it was the same situation Cunningham had faced just months earlier. Her father encouraged her to reach out to Dennard, and within hours, the two were on the phone, commiserating and sharing their stories.
In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion protections and Texas began banning the procedure in nearly all instances, dozens of women have come forward to share their stories about being denied care in the face of dangerous pregnancies. Many, like Dennard, have joined litigation against the state, claiming the exceptions built into its abortion restrictions are too vague for physicians to intervene.
But they have also found each other, building connections around an increasingly shared trauma. Dennard and Cunningham, now close friends, for instance, are part of a group text with other women – most of them plaintiffs in the lawsuit Dennard is part of – where they share their challenges and advice, recommend medical specialists and discuss their grief and coping mechanisms.
“They are probably my biggest support group,” said Cunningham, 37, of the Dallas area. “Just connecting with others who had similar experiences reduces my feelings of isolation, and they are the only ones that truly know what it feels like mentally, physically, emotionally to go through what I did.”
Dr. Bhavik Kumar, medical director for primary and transgender care at Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast in Houston, occasionally travels to perform abortions in states where it’s legal.
Kumar said in the last couple years he has seen on a more regular basis that patients are connecting with each other and opening up more in waiting rooms. He overhears that they’ll ask each other things like how far along they are or how far they had to travel to be there.
“The fact that folks sort of have to rely on each other to build this community and support one another, it’s unfortunate, but there’s also some beauty in that,” Kumar said. “While this is not the scenario we would have chosen for one another, it is something that I see happening in a way that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, especially on this scale.”
Read the rest. Dr. Dennard is a plaintiff in the Zurawski litigation; the story didn’t specify that and it got me to wondering if there were some other lawsuits that I had missed. If there are, I’m still missing them. Anyway, I’m glad these women have each other. I wish the reasons why they know each other were different, but here we are. I’m sadly certain their ranks will grow. I’m going to stop now before my head explodes.