Africa-Press – Botswana. “I have to carry my baby to bury him”, confessed the woman, who will be forced to travel to another US state in order to perform the procedure.
A woman in the US state of Louisiana was prevented from having an abortion, despite the doctors’ recommendation, upon the discovery that her baby has a rare fatal condition, and will not survive.
It was around 10 weeks of gestation that the baby of Nancy Davis, 36, was diagnosed with acrania, a rare fetal anomaly characterized by the partial or total absence of the skull, preventing him from surviving beyond the first week of life, says the NBC News.
Health professionals accompanying the mother of three recommended that the pregnancy be terminated. However, they could not be the ones to carry out the intervention, due to the laws that restrict abortion in that US state, as a consequence of the revocation of the ‘Roe v. Wade’ by the Supreme Court, which granted the country the constitutional right to abortion nearly 50 years ago. The laws were, however, questioned as they are “unconstitutional” and “vague”.
“Basically, they said I have to carry my baby to bury him,” confessed the woman, now 16 weeks pregnant.
At a press conference on Friday, Nancy’s lawyer, Benjamin Crump, criticized state lawmakers for putting the woman at risk and in an “inhumane” position.
“Thanks to the actions of Louisiana legislators, Davis was left without medical assistance to do what doctors said should be done, terminate the pregnancy. By putting himself between Davis and his doctors, Louisiana legislators inflicted unspeakable pain, psychological, and physical risks for this beautiful mother”, he shot.
“They replaced care with confusion. Privacy with politics. Options with ideology,” he added.
For her part, attorney Carol Powell Lexing considered that the state “has placed a burden on Davis and other women” who resort to voluntary termination of pregnancy for medical reasons.
“It’s so unfair. It’s horrible,” he concluded.
Nancy Davis, who launched a fundraising campaign on the GoFundMe platform , is expected to head to another US state to perform the procedure next week. She believes, however, that it is necessary to include genetic defects such as her baby’s in the list of exceptions that give access to abortion in Louisiana.
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