Harm and Hope in Post-Roe America

June 22, 2023

Dear Meteor readers,

As you know, we’re devoting our coverage this week to the one year anniversary of the overturning of Roe v. Wade and its unprecedented real-life consequences. Today we hear from Nancy Davis, a Louisiana woman who made headlines last fall when she was denied an abortion under the most harrowing circumstances—and who since then has committed to ensuring no one else has to go through what she did.

We keep on,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

PS: In case you missed it yesterday, our own Brittany Packnett Cunningham talked to Vice President Kamala Harris for an exclusive interview on her podcast UNDISTRACTED.

TAKE ME TO THE PODCAST

A YEAR WITHOUT ROE

“I Knew From the Beginning That This Wasn’t Just About Me”

Nancy Davis’ story of harm and hope in post-Roe America

When Nancy Davis, 36, found out she was pregnant last summer, she was so happy that she danced around her home with her fiancé and two children to celebrate. “It was like a party,” she told The Meteor’s Tara Abrahams. But at her 10-week checkup, an anatomy scan showed that the fetus Davis was carrying was developing without a skull. “The top of the head was completely gone,” she says. The prognosis was grim: If Davis tried to carry her pregnancy to term and deliver, doctors warned that the child would die within minutes. She needed an abortion.

But Davis lives in Louisiana, where she couldn’t legally obtain an abortion because the specific condition her fetus had—acrania—was not explicitly mentioned in the list of exceptions the state uses to determine if an abortion is acceptable. Fearing legal repercussions, doctors in Louisiana refused to help Davis, and she eventually had to travel out of state to receive help.

You might recognize these details, since Davis shared her story with the public last fall. But since then, she’s become an activist—a spokesperson for the unknown numbers of women navigating a post-Roe world, especially Black and brown women; and the founder of the Nancy Davis Foundation, which works to help people who have been traumatized by their attempts to obtain abortions.

In her advocacy, Davis joins an increasing number of patients-turned-activists in post-Dobbs America. There’s Amanda Zurawski, who almost lost her life to sepsis and has joined a groundbreaking lawsuit against the state of Texas. There’s Anya Cook, whose water broke at 16 weeks and who almost died from blood loss after being denied care; Tuesday she joined a roundtable with the First Lady to speak out about her experience.

And there’s Nancy Davis, whose experience changed the trajectory of her life. Watch the video here as she explains how.