Biden surrogates push for abortion rights in Tucson campaign stop

About 18 weeks into her pregnancy and just days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Amanda Zurawski got “catastrophic” news: her cervix was dilated prematurely, meaning the baby that had taken a grueling fertility treatment to conceive would not make it.

Zurawski, who lives in Texas, said the only safe course of action was to receive a medical abortion — but it was illegal.

To comply with Texas law, her doctor refused to perform the abortion until her life was considered in danger. Soon, Zurawski developed sepsis not once, but twice, and was transferred to the ICU.

“What I went through was nothing short of barbaric and it didn’t need to happen,” Zurawski told a small crowd of mostly women gathered Thursday morning at Tucson’s Exo Roast Company. “But it did, because of Donald Trump.”

Zurawski, a surrogate for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, stopped by Tucson alongside Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana native with a similar abortion story, while on a tour to swing states across the country to speak about reproductive rights.

Currently in Arizona, it is legal to get an abortion until a patient is 15 weeks pregnant, though they can be hard to come by. There are two abortion clinics in Southern Arizona.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in April that a long-dormant 1864 law criminalizing abortion except to save the life of the mother could again be enforced since Roe was overturned. State lawmakers then voted to repeal the territorial-era law. An initiative to enshrine abortion rights into the state Constitution is expected to be on Arizona’s November ballot.

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It can be “rough” to embark on a speaking tour about something so traumatic, Joshua said in an interview after the Tucson event. But, she added, “there’s way too much at stake.”

“Not only are we going around telling our story, we make it our business to make sure that we are also being a listening ear for women that we meet on the campaign trail that have the exact same story,” Joshua said.

Joshua suffered a miscarriage 11 weeks into her pregnancy, just weeks after Roe v. Wade was overturned. She got turned away from the hospital she went to, despite extreme cramping and blood loss so intense she was confined to a wheelchair. The doctors, she said, told her they would pray for her.

The two women were joined by congressional hopeful Kirsten Engel, a Democrat seeking to unseat Republican U.S. Rep. Juan Ciscomani; Tucson Democratic state Rep. Stephanie Stahl Hamilton; and Amy Fitch-Heacock, co-founder of Arizonans for Reproductive Freedom.

“The last few months in Arizona have really underscored the importance of protecting our reproductive freedoms,” Stahl Hamilton said, becoming emotional. She was one of the state representatives who introduced the bill to repeal the 1864 abortion law, and received a large round of applause from attendees Thursday.

“It was our duty to fight back against these egregious attacks on our very fundamental freedoms,” Stahl Hamilton told the group. “It was an historic and consequential fight for our freedoms, and I am so grateful to have sponsored House Bill 2677 to repeal that 1864 total abortion ban.”

The fight isn’t over, she said. The Arizona law does not have exceptions for victims of rape or incest, something Stahl Hamilton would like to see changed.

“We are living in an Arizona where women have been stripped of their bodily autonomy and freedom,” she said. “And that won’t change unless we show up in November.”