Louisiana woman faces 'horrifically cruel' abortion choice over fetus missing skull

A pregnant Louisiana woman faced with either carrying a skull-less fetus to term – for the baby to likely die within hours – or traveling several states away to obtain an abortion has hired a prominent civil rights attorney as she weighs how to move forward.

Nancy Davis has retained lawyer Ben Crump as she becomes the latest to embody the gut-wrenching decisions some women are being forced to make after the US supreme court’s decision in June to strip away nationwide abortion rights, according to a statement from the attorney’s office.

Davis’s home state is among those that have outlawed abortion with very few exceptions. Davis, from Baton Rouge, said publicly that she tried to have her pregnancy aborted after a 10-week ultrasound revealed that her fetus was missing the top of its skull – a condition known as acrania, which kills babies within minutes or hours of birth.

But because acrania was not explicitly included on Louisiana’s list of conditions justifying an exception from the state’s abortion ban, the hospital that treated Davis turned down terminating her pregnancy, which, as of Friday, was in its 13th week.

The medical center, Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, directed her to an abortion clinic. But Louisiana’s abortion clinics have announced plans to leave the state amid legal battles over its the ban’s enforcement, the New Orleans news outlet Gambit reported.

The state senator who authored Louisiana’s abortion ban, Katrina Jackson, insisted to Baton Rouge TV station WAFB that the hospital should have authorized the termination of Davis’s pregnancy, because the statute contains exceptions for fetuses which are not viable outside a mother’s womb.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/20/louisiana-abortion-woman-nancy-davis-benjamin-crump

Lousyanna, sucking harder than ever.