Candidate for Texas governor, who staged a 13-hour filibuster to save abortion rights, says neither pregnancy was viable

This article is more than 6 years old

This article is more than 6 years old

Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor who sprung to fame when she held back sweeping abortion restrictions, reveals in a new memoir that she terminated two pregnancies for medical reasons.

Davis writes in a new campaign memoir that in the 1990s she had two abortions, including one where the foetus had developed a severe brain abnormality.

Davis writes in Forgetting to be Afraid that she had an abortion in 1996 after an examination revealed that the brain of the foetus had developed in complete separation on the right and left sides. She also describes ending an earlier ectopic pregnancy, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus.

Davis disclosed the terminated pregnancies for the first time since her 13-hour filibuster in the state legislature – she talked non-stop to try to run out the time on proposed legislation bringing in tough new Texas abortion laws.

Both pregnancies happened before Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth, began her political career and after she was already a mother to two young girls.

She writes that the ectopic pregnancy happened in 1994 during her first trimester. Terminating the pregnancy was considered medically necessary. Such pregnancies generally are considered not viable, meaning the foetus can’t survive, and the mother’s life could be in danger. But Davis wrote that in Texas it’s “technically considered an abortion and doctors have to report it as such”.

Davis said she and her former husband, Jeff, wound up expecting another child in 1996. After a later exam revealed the brain defect, doctors told her the baby would be deaf, blind and in a permanent vegetative state if she survived delivery.

“I could feel her little body tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to her, and I knew then what I needed to do,” Davis writes. “She was suffering.”

Davis is running against Republican attorney general Greg Abbott, who is a heavy favourite to replace the inclumbent Republican governor, Rick Perry, in 2015.

Davis’s filibuster in June 2013 set off a chaotic scene in the Texas Capitol that extended past midnight. Thousands of people packed watched it live online, with President Barack Obama at one point tweeting: “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.”

The bill required doctors who perform abortion to obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and mandated that clinics upgrade facilities to hospital-level operating standards. A federal judge in Austin last month blocked a portion of the law that would have left Texas with only seven abortion facilities statewide.