Two mothers. Two post-Roe nightmares come to life | Opinion

Kate Cox is a pregnant 31-year-old married mother of two. I suspect she’d rather be picking out colors for a nursery and becoming a mother of three than having her story generate national headlines.

And yet, Texas “pro-life” Attorney General Ken Paxton doesn’t care. He’s decided to get between Cox and her doctors even though it jeopardizes Cox’s life today and her ability to birth children in years to come. Late Monday, the Texas Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed Cox to get an abortion, and her attorneys say she has now left the state to have the procedure.

Then there’s 33-year-old Brittany Watts of Warren, Ohio. She was pregnant. She knew something had been going wrong with her pregnancy, which is why she visited two hospitals, each of which turned her away. She eventually had a miscarriage (or stillbirth) while using the restroom. Prosecutors are charging her with felony abuse of a corpse for trying to plunge the toilet.

“The issue isn’t how the child died, when the child died — it’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet, large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet and she went on (with) her day...,” Warren Assistant Prosecutor Lewis Guarnieri said in court.

With all that’s happening in the world it’s easy to forget the domestic dangers still lurking, including how women are being treated in the U.S. since the overturning of Roe v. Wade. States such as South Carolina and Alabama have been prosecuting pregnant women under dubious circumstances for the past couple of decades. But Cox and Watts cases are a sobering reminder that there’s more work to do here since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision even as we look abroad.

Cox’s baby was diagnosed with trisomy 18, a devastating condition which means the baby would survive maybe a few days outside of the womb. About 95% of trisomy 18 pregnancies don’t survive full term. Because of her health situation, including two prior cesarean surgeries, she’s at risk of losing her fertility and “uterine rupture and hysterectomy,” according to a lawsuit she filed against Texas.

But “pro-life” Paxton threatened medical providers in the state with potential prosecution if they helped her.

Meanwhile, prosecutors in Ohio have been moving forward against Watts despite the testimony of forensic pathologist Dr. George Sterbenz, who said her baby was “going to be non-viable” because “her water had broken early — and the fetus was too young to be delivered.”

No one knows for certain, but maybe a quarter of pregnancies end in miscarriage. No one knows for certain because sometimes they happen before women even realize they are pregnant, and many happen far away from hospital or other medical settings, which is what happened to Watts after hospitals turned her away.

Each stillbirth or miscarriage is gut-wrenching. Each comes with an enormous amount of emotional trauma, and sometimes physical. For the expecting woman or couple, they can leave life-long wounds.

That’s why it’s beyond obvious that such decisions should not be made by politicians such as Paxton or by prosecutors. And it doesn’t matter what decision you or I would make in similar circumstances, or what course we’ve convinced ourselves others should take. I should have no say in your decision, and you no say in mine.

Small-government conservatives claim they want parents empowered and families left alone — expect, apparently, when those parents and families don’t do what conservatives such as Paxton want.

Before the overturning of Roe, women screamed and shouted about the new dangers they’d face in a post-Roe world, even more than they did during the Roe era, which marked an uneasy but necessary compromise. They were right. Not enough of us listened. We should listen now, because their lives depend on it.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.