by Wendy Davis
After I dressed, Will brought me a boiled egg, my usual quick breakfast. It’s his practice to draw faces with a Sharpie pen on the boiled eggs he keeps in his refrigerator—a fun sight gag for his teenage daughters, Larkin and Kyrie, and a novel way to distinguish them from the raw eggs on the same shelf. On this morning Will brought me an egg with an angry grimace, its eyebrows furrowed, its eyes narrowed, its mouth set in a resolute line. I knew that this “badass” egg face was the perfect choice to help me start the day ahead. All it could have used was a penned-in pirate’s eye patch.
Will kissed and hugged me good-bye, promising to come to the capitol later in the day, and as the door closed behind me, I looked down at the flats I was wearing and wondered if they’d have enough support for all the hours I was going to be on my feet. Worrying that they wouldn’t, I ran back inside, grabbed my pink running shoes, still dusty from my frequent runs around Lady Bird Lake, and headed back out the door for a long day at the capitol. Little did I know that by the time I walked back in through that same door, my life would be forever changed, in ways I never thought possible.
—
When I arrived at the capitol around 8:00 a.m., my staff was still busy pulling together material for me to read, even working with other Democratic senate offices who had pitched in like true team players to help find materials and assemble them. There would be hours and hours to fill by talking or reading from relevant sources, and we had to have enough—running out was not an option. The team effort paid off. Binders bulged with previous court decisions on reproductive rights in America, expert testimony from a variety of professionals who understood the ramifications of the law that was being proposed, detailed descriptions of existing clinical standards for both abortion clinics and ambulatory surgical centers all across the state of Texas, and questions and reading materials my colleagues thought would be helpful. Most important, they contained written testimony submitted by witnesses who had hoped to have a chance to testify during committee hearings on the bill, testimony that had not been heard or read into the record. Personal testimony by women who were pleading for their right to reproductive health care that included vital tests and screenings.
In both the house and senate committee hearings held on the bill, testimony had been limited. Thousands of women and many men had signed up to speak, but the committee chairs had cut them off after several hours, with the house committee chair telling witnesses who’d been waiting for many hours for their turn to testify that their testimony had become “repetitive.” Rightly, the witnesses were offended that their personal stories of pain, of having faced pregnancy-termination decisions themselves or through the experience of a loved one, would be dismissed so callously.
As the zero hour of 11:11 a.m. approached, time was running short for me to deal with a problem I knew had to be resolved before I walked out onto the senate floor. It had become patently clear that I was not going to be able to secure the tubing and the large bag on my leg in a way that would keep it from slipping below my dress and down my leg. By 8:30 my staff was reaching out to the doctor who had inserted it earlier. Could we get a leg bag instead? Around 9:15 a.m., a nurse arrived, we closed the door to my private office, and she changed out the bag. Problem solved, I thought as I continued to work with my team on reviewing the materials they’d gathered and to strategize as to how I would lay everything out when I took the floor.
But within the hour I had a realization: Problem not solved. Something was terribly wrong. My lower abdomen was growing increasingly uncomfortable, and when I checked the leg bag, not an ounce had drained into it. Once again my staff began making urgent calls to the doctor’s office. By 10:30 we still had not succeeded in getting anyone to the capitol to determine the problem. As time was ticking toward 11:11, I began to grow desperate. In the senate ladies’ lounge, I unsuccessfully attempted to remove the catheter altogether, knowing that the discomfort would be far greater with it in place than it would be going through the day without it. With minutes left before I needed to be on the floor, the nurse reappeared, breathless. Parking near the capitol had become impossible, given the thousands of people who were already arriving to lend their voices, both pro and con, to the day. She’d had to run several blocks and made it just in time to discover that there was a blockage where she had inserted the tube into the bag. Clearing it brought instant relief. I had just enough time to empty the bag, reattach it to my leg, and make my way to the floor.
The gallery was already completely full when I entered the chamber and there was a brief bit of clapping and quiet cheering when I approached my desk. Most of the people in the gallery wore burnt orange T-shirts—the only color an Austin supplier had in stock in large quantities, because it’s the color of U.T.—but in the gallery above my desk, on the eastern side of the chamber, there were several people dressed in light blue, the color supporters of the bill wore. When I saw them there, I felt certain that their seating choice had been purposeful. Against the walls of the west, north, and south ends of the senate chamber, the chairs for senate staffers were fully occupied: each senator is allowed two staffers on the floor at a time, and all had come armed with the maximum assistance they knew they would need.
Because I had previously provided the lieutenant governor with the customary courtesy written notice that I would be filibustering the bill, the press was aware and had therefore gathered en masse on the senate floor to film us. Typically, on days when important issues come before us, we might have four or five press cameras on the floor. But when I walked on the floor, trying to regain my composure after the catheter debacle, I noticed that the floor was filled with cameras behind the brass railing that separates senators from others on the floor—no one other than a senator or someone from the sergeant-at-arms office is allowed inside the rail. All the cameras were set up just outside the rail on the north, south, and west sides of the chamber, with a clear view of the lieutenant governor’s dais on the east side of the floor and all the action on the floor. Normally they’d stay a short while, just long enough to capture some B-roll footage to accompany television news segments, but today they settled in. Like me, they were in it for the long haul.
My heart was racing as I reached my desk, which was now missing my chair—it had just been removed to give me standing room—and I was filled with an anxiety that is hard to describe. Within minutes, the lieutenant governor called on the author of the SB 5 to lay it out as newly amended, and Senator Glenn Hegar spoke very briefly to explain the difference between the original and amended versions. Then, at 11:18 a.m., Central Standard Time, it was my turn:
I intend to speak for an extended period of time on the bill. Thank you very much.
And so it began.
Members, I’m rising on the floor today to humbly give voice to thousands of Texans who have been ignored. These are Texans who relied on the minority members of this senate in order for their voices to be heard. These voices have been silenced by a governor who made blind partisanship and personal political ambition the official business of our great state. And sadly he’s being abetted by legislative leaders who either share this blind partisanship or simply do not have the strength to oppose it. Partisanship and ambition are not unusual in the state capitol, but here in Texas, right now, it has risen to a level of profound irresponsibility and the raw abuse of power. The actions intended by our state leaders on this particular bill hurt Texans. There is no doubt about that. They hurt women; they hurt their families. The actions in this bill undermine the hard work and commitment of fair-minded, mainstream Texas families, who want nothing more than to work hard, raise their children, stay healthy, and be a productive part of the greatest state in our country. These mainstream Texas families embrace the challenge to create the greatest possible Texas. Yet they are pushed back and have been held down by narrow and divisive interests that are driving our state, and this bill is an example of that narrow partisanship.
Today I’m goi
ng to talk about the path these leaders have chosen under this bill and the dark place that the bill will take us. I will try to explain the history of the failed legislation before us, the impact of that legislation, and most importantly what history tells us about these policies and the motivations behind them. They do real damage to our state and to the families whose rights are violated and whose personal relationships with their doctor and their Creator, which should belong to them and them alone, are being violated. Most importantly, today I will share with you what thousands of families have had to say about this legislation, and those bringing this legislation to the floor, when the majority of Texans want us working to press upon genuine business of the state of Texas.
—
Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst usually kept the senate chambers very cold—around 67 degrees—which is why I kept a blanket at my desk: I was always freezing. I worried that he would lower the temperature even more, but if he did I didn’t notice. What I did notice was the sun coming through the tall windows on the north and south sides of the senate chambers, and feeling the warmth of it on me as I began. I decided to take it as a sign.
At about 1:00 p.m. I began to read the committee-hearing testimony that had been submitted but had not been read into the record. I wanted to give voice to all those who had wanted to share their stories and yet had not been heard in house the previous day. As my staff watched me moving through the binder that contained these personal stories, they began to worry that we would run out too soon and that I wouldn’t be able to fill the remaining eleven hours, even with all the other materials they’d given me, if they didn’t get more stories. So, unbeknownst to me, they put out a call through social media inviting people to share their stories with us. And stories started pouring in via e-mail. Heart-wrenching stories. Over sixteen thousand in all. Sixteen thousand voices wanting desperately to be heard, wanting desperately to stop this bill, knowing all too personally the devastating consequences that would follow its passage.
I’d not had time to read any of the stories beforehand. And though I thought I was prepared for the challenge I would face in wanting to do each story justice, in giving each of the people behind the stories a voice, I hadn’t understood nor was I prepared for how deeply emotional each would feel to me as I read them. Simultaneously, my realization of how great the physical challenge of the day would be began to seep in. Likely as a result of both the physical stress of standing in one spot and the resulting physical stress that accompanied my anxiety, my lower back began to hurt. A nagging pain that I’d been experiencing as a consequence of being fifty years old and refusing to give up on the day-to-day pounding my body experienced as a part of my dedication to running, a pain that always flared up if was in a fixed position for any length of time. To relieve it I’d begun to walk in circles around my desk, back and forth in front of it. And back and forth behind it.
And then, right before my third hour of speaking, I came across the story of Carole M.
“No one ever thinks they’re going to be faced with a decision of terminating a much-wanted pregnancy or deciding when to shut off the life support of their beloved child,” her letter began. My pacing temporarily halted as I took a breath, the chambers around me disappearing as I lost focus on everything except her words, words that I felt I would know before I read any further, words that I knew would be hard to speak out loud. Still, I continued to read her tragic tale to my senate colleagues and to the hundreds of people seated so quietly, so respectfully, in a hush above us in the gallery:
On December 1, 2008, I was thrilled to discover that I was pregnant with my first child. My husband and I had recently married and decided to start having kids right away. Four months later we went in for a regularly scheduled ultrasound at twenty weeks, where we were going to find out if we were having a boy or a girl. Finding out your baby’s sex is easily the most exciting time of pregnancy. And we were ecstatic to discover that we were having a girl. Unfortunately, that moment was cut short when the ob-gyn also told us that our baby was sick and referred us to the maternal fetal specialist. Two days later we were given the heartbreaking news that our daughter was not only sick but had a terminal condition, hydrops fetalis, in which an abnormal amount of fluid builds up in the body. Given the early onset of my daughter’s illness, her condition was very grave, and we left the specialist’s office with our choices. We could wait until she passed, induce my labor, or have a dilation and extraction. Knowing that your daughter is dying is heartbreaking. When you are given the news that there is nothing that can be done to save your baby’s life, it feels like your soul has been ripped apart, but we had a decision to make. Even if we decided not to do anything, we were still making a decision, and we had a limited amount of time to decide. There were so many things to consider. Did I want to hold my baby? Did I want to name her? Did I want to have her baptized? Where would she be buried? Would I be able to hold her while she died, if she somehow did survive until term?
In the meantime, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t leave the house. Every time that I left the house, someone would comment on my pregnancy. They asked perfectly normal questions about my due date, the gender, the name. I answered their questions as nicely as I could, and then I would turn around and burst into tears. So eventually I stopped leaving my house.
My voice and hands shook; I wiped tears from my eyes. It was a tale of tremendous sadness, heartache, and grief, and one that was so hauntingly familiar I could barely speak it out loud. It could have been my story. The story of Tate and what Jeff and I had gone through. And it felt as though I was reading words I could have written and as though I was exposing a pain so deep, a pain tucked in the most private of corners that was now being exposed. I did not and still do not know Carole, but I understood that she and I shared a bond that neither of us would have wished to share, and my heart was filled with an aching empathy for her. Somehow I managed to remain composed enough to continue reading aloud:
I couldn’t eat because my stomach was in knots from the anxiety. I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, and I didn’t know when it would happen. And I definitely couldn’t sleep. I was petrified that my baby was going to die while I was asleep. I just knew that I was going to wake up one day and discover that she had died at some point during the night. The idea that I couldn’t be with her and know when she had passed was more than I could bear. We decided to have my labor induced. It felt like the best path for our family.
We started making burial arrangements. We didn’t have a grave plot for her because we never anticipated needing one. Instead of planning a nursery, I was picking out a headstone for my baby. Instead of choosing an outfit for her to wear home, I was picking out her burial gown. It was devastating, but there was some comfort in the fact that we were moving forward. Except we weren’t really moving forward. Shortly after making our decision to have my labor induced, we were informed that it wasn’t really possible. My husband worked for Seton at the time, so we had Seton insurance. As a faith-based organization, Seton would not allow us to have our labor induced while our daughter still had a heartbeat. That meant that we were either forced to wait until she passed or agree to have her heart stopped. After weeks of being crippled by grief and anxiety, I couldn’t imagine waiting any longer. Our obstetrician appealed to the ethics board at Seton on our behalf, but our appeal was denied, so we made the decision to have our daughter’s heart stopped.
In the meantime I prayed and begged for a miracle. A miracle that I knew wasn’t coming. Every night I would talk to my baby, who we named Amber Grace, and I would tell her that I loved her—I would tell her that I loved her and that I was sorry that she was sick. And then I would tell her that it was okay to leave me.
At this point, my daughter was going to die, and it was only a matter of time when and where it happened, and if we could avoid having her heart stopped, then that is what we prayed for, but she didn’t die on her own. On Apri
l 8, 2009, we went to the specialist’s office. At 5:00 p.m., we took a final look at our baby on the screen, said our good-byes, and her heart was stopped less than an hour later. My labor was induced that night, and she was delivered four years ago, on April 9. I held her, kissed her—I watched her get baptized—told her that I loved her, and said good-bye.
None of our daughter’s life and death went as planned or expected. I expected to have her for the rest of my life. And when that wasn’t possible, I expected to be able to say good-bye to her in the way that I had chosen, but that wasn’t possible either. It is very frustrating to feel like the choices you have made for your baby’s life and death are not being respected. Hearing that your baby is going to die makes everything in your life feel like it is out of your control. Being told that you don’t really have any control over how your baby is going to die is devastating and self-defeating.
I chose to have a baby and to bring her into this world. I should be allowed to make the very personal, very private, and very painful decision as to how she leaves it, guided by the best interest of my child and my family. If a twenty-week ban had been in place four years ago, then I wouldn’t have been able to make this choice. Waiting for your child to pass is certainly a viable option for many who have been in my position. But so is the path that I chose and would choose again.
—
Reading Carole’s story was heart-wrenching. Her family’s story was so very much like my own. It shook me to my core. For an instant, I felt compelled to talk about Tate, to share my story and add it to the others I was reading out loud, to give voice to my own pain and loss and grief as so many courageous women had. But knowing such an unexpected and dramatically personal confession would overshadow the events of the day, I knew the time wasn’t right. I moved on to another letter.