A procedural change would force individuals to take on costly and difficult legal battles.
In a Mother Jones article, a discussion of what the battle might look like for patients.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs eight abortion clinics across the country, has firsthand experience leading the legal fight against abortion restrictions. In 2015, she sued Texas over an anti-abortion law nearly identical to Louisiana’s. She describes the process of being the plaintiff in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, in which the Supreme Court struck down the Texas law in 2016, as a trauma that she’ll never forget, and not just because she was forced to close clinics and turn away women who needed abortion care. She vividly recalls the opposing attorneys raking through Whole Woman’s Health’s emails in the discovery process and the vitriol that she and her colleagues received as a result of being the faces of a high-profile case.
“If a pregnant person had to bring a lawsuit on behalf of themselves, and undertake what we have gone through, it’s not only ridiculous, it’s actually cruel,” Hagstrom Miller says. “I’ve been through depositions, I’ve been in the witness stand myself. And even if I was [anonymous], how disruptive that is, and the discovery and the process and the time it takes to even go through the preparation for a deposition or being a witness, it’s really, really difficult. So just saying, ‘Oh, well, that’s the only path to justice that a patient could have,’ it’s scary and it’s also just extreme.”
Read the entire article here
