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Late on a Wednesday, Taylor Mahaffey, 23 — who had been previously diagnosed with a condition known as incompetent cervix — felt something was off. Having suffered through a miscarriage during a previous pregnancy, the couple rushed to St. David’s North Austin Medical Center only to discover that Taylor’s cervix had prematurely dilated and their son’s legs were already emerging.
Hospital doctors attempted several emergency procedures to keep the developing baby inside the womb, said Daniel Mahaffey, 29. But nothing worked.
“We just wanted him out,” Mahaffey said. “We didn’t want him to suffer.”
But the couple ran into the state’s ban on abortions at or after 20 weeks of gestation, included in strict anti-abortion legislation known as House Bill 2 passed by state lawmakers in 2013. Because the baby and mother were technically healthy, doctors told the Mahaffeys they could not induce labor even though their son would not survive out of the womb.
“They said because of the law, they couldn’t induce because it would be considered an abortion,” Daniel Mahaffey said. His wife was just shy of the 20-week mark, Mahaffey said. “I think they were afraid because we were so close,” he added.
The law allows abortions after 20 weeks only when the mother’s life is in danger or when a fetal abnormality has been detected. Neither of those applied in the Mahaffey’s case. The couple was left to wait for “nature to take its course,” Mahaffey said.
“The whole thing was an absolute nightmare,” Mahaffey said of the three days they spent crying and waiting. “She could feel him moving around.”
The couple returned to the hospital after Taylor began bleeding. Last Sunday, she eventually gave birth to a stillborn baby boy.
The tragic ordeal appears to be one of the side effects of House Bill 2, and several doctors say such consequences are not limited to the Mahaffey’s case. The 2013 restrictions — and the larger, intense political climate in Texas surrounding abortion — are overwhelming the physician-patient relationship and holding some doctors back from acting on medical judgment that balances professional protocols and compassionate care, they say.
Other restrictions in the law include a requirement that doctors obtain admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the abortion clinic from which they work, and a provision requiring abortion facilities to meet the same hospital-like standards of surgical centers. The constitutionality of those provisions is currently being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Protocols for determining when a medically indicated induction of labor is necessary weigh many factors, and some doctors deciding to move forward with the procedure might meet resistance at some institutions, said Dr. Moss Hampton, an OB-GYN in Odessa who chairs the Texas arm of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.
“I think everybody’s tolerance for that is going to be different,” Hampton said. “I think the law has got a lot of people scared, and if they feel they can’t defend [a procedure] 100 percent then I’m sure there are a lot of folks out there that would just back off.”
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