In 2022 a murder charge landed Lizelle Gonzalez in a Texas jail for three days with a half-a-million-dollar bond and put her face all over the news.
Gonzalez was 26 at the time and her crime, two prosecutors argued in a grand jury indictment, had been taking medication to terminate her 19-week pregnancy.
The case was full of flaws, perhaps the largest being the prosecutors’ failure to tell the jury that Texas law explicitly prohibits the state from prosecuting pregnant people for murder if they have sought abortion care.
The charges were dismissed shortly after they were brought. Two years later, Gonzalez is suing the prosecutors — the Starr County district attorney Gocha Ramirez and assistant district attorney Alexandria Lynn Barrera — in federal court for malicious prosecution.
Cecilia Garza, Gonzalez’s lawyer, said that prosecutorial immunity did not apply in this case because Ramirez and Barrera were acting as “detectives” rather than operating within the scope of their duties as state attorneys.
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“The legal basis of this lawsuit is not about her reproductive rights, the legal basis of this lawsuit it’s the unconstitutional violation of her basic civil rights when she was arrested and charged with a crime that does not exist in the state of Texas,” Garza said during a press conference on Tuesday.
A case built on a house of cards
Gonzalez’s abortion was reported to the authorities by staff at Starr County Memorial Hospital, where she received care on January 7, 2022, after taking Misoprostol, an abortion-inducing medication that is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat ulcers.
Ramirez and Barrera brought the charges before a grand jury about two months later, and Gonzalez was arrested in April of that year.
“Defendants Ramirez and Barrera conspired to, and did, present false information and recklessly misrepresented facts in order to pursue murder charges against [the] plaintiff for acts clearly not criminal under the Texas penal code,” Gonzalez’s lawsuit claims.
Ramirez went on to publicly admit there was no legal basis for Gonzalez’s indictment and arrest, and in an April 2022 statement said: “It is clear to me that the events leading up to this indictment have taken a toll on Ms [Gonzalez] and her family. To ignore this fact would be shortsighted.” He claimed, however, that it was his duty to “investigate” the reports made by hospital staff.
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After an investigation by the state bar of Texas, Ramirez was ordered earlier this year to pay a $1,250 fine for his prosecution of Gonzalez. A probate licence suspension was also imposed for one year.
The inquiry refuted Ramirez’s prior claims that he had not been properly briefed on the case and that his assistant attorney was the one with knowledge about its intricacies. He “knowingly made a false statement of material fact in his written response to the complaint”, the bar’s order stated.
Gonzalez is seeking $1 million in damages. Speaking at the press conference alongside Gonzalez, her lawyer Garza said Ramirez and Barrera committed a “flagrant violation of Gonzalez’s rights”.
“Their actions cannot and will not be characterised as a simple mistake,” Garza said, noting that she was unsure whether their motives were “personal or religious”.
Veronica Martinez, another attorney for Gonzalez, said that the arrest had a huge impact on her client’s physical and mental health.
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Gonzalez had to be transported to a hospital after she began hyperventilating and experiencing shortness of breath on her second day at the county jail. She was only released after posting the $500,000, Martinez said, not because the charges had been dismissed as Ramirez initially claimed in a press release.
Experts say Gonzalez’s lawsuit could have a wider impact on the growing number of abortion-related prosecutions in the US after Roe v Wade was overturned.
Melissa Murray, a law professor at New York University, told The New York Times that the suit could lead to a sense “that we are moving very quickly into a kind of dystopian, post-Dobbs landscape”. This was in reference to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, the Supreme Court decision that overturned 1973’s Roe v Wade decision, which guaranteed the constitutional right to an abortion.
Post-Dobbs hurdles
That Supreme Court decision in the summer of 2022 increased, virtually overnight, the hurdles for people living in conservative states who wished to terminate their pregnancies.
In states where Republicans enacted so-called trigger laws in anticipation of Roe being struck down, many Americans have had to resort to travelling out of state, even in instances where the foetus has no chance of survival.
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There has also been an increase in cases like that of Gonzalez, where women have been charged and jailed over abortions. Last year in Ohio, where abortions are legal for the first 22 weeks of the pregnancy, prosecutors tried and failed to charge a woman after she miscarried, in the bathroom of her home, a pregnancy deemed non-viable.
Last month, Eva Burch, an Arizona state senator for the Democratic Party, stood before her chamber to give a rousing speech about the many challenges and inconveniences that she endured to terminate a non-viable pregnancy.
Along with being faced by protesters at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Phoenix where she was treated, she was also subjected to unnecessary ultrasounds and questions by her physician to get there. However, in a Zoom call with The Times only 24 hours after her procedure, she said that “it was much less traumatising than having a miscarriage”.
“I knew I was not going to have to go through another miscarriage,” she said. “I was not going to have to be afraid, I was going to bleed too much or have to go through all that pain. My [previous] miscarriage was much more painful, much more frightening, and much more traumatic.”
An abortion made all the difference to Burch, who wanted to carry out her pregnancy to term but could not. She also emphasised that abortion was an option for people whose pregnancies were viable but wished, for whatever reason, not to continue with them.
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On her speech in the state senate, which has been lauded by such Democratic figures as Kamala Harris, the vice-president, and Katie Hobbs, the governor of Arizona, Burch said: “I was just really grateful for the opportunity to be able to not only have my story told and have my voice heard but to know that it echoed the voices and the experiences of so many people who are not afforded an opportunity to have their voice heard in Arizona lawmaking.”
Burch asked that her colleagues consider how the cracks in the law affected the lives of their constituents. Her demands appeared to fall on deaf ears among Republicans, many of whom are said to have walked out during her speech. (Sonny Borrelli, the state senate’s Republican majority leader, told The Times it was not unusual for him to step out of the chamber “due to many responsibilities I have”.)
Women take the fight to Washington
Allie Phillips is part of the first generation of women who have turned to politics after experiencing first-hand the consequences of restrictive abortion laws after the Supreme Court’s decision.
Now a candidate for the Tennessee house of representatives, Phillips was forced to travel from her hometown of Clarksville to New York city to have an abortion in 2022.
Although she had been planning her pregnancy for a while, she later found out the foetus had several birth defects and a very slim chance of survival. Despite grave concerns about Phillips’s health, too, an abortion was denied to her in Tennessee, subjecting her to emotional and financial challenges as she sought healthcare elsewhere.
Last month, Phillips was invited to the White House for women’s history month, an opportunity that she said helped her realise why her advocacy is so important. “It felt validating, it felt like my story was being held in places,” Phillips said. “What I went through is being acknowledged and what I’m doing is also being acknowledged.”
With the abortion pill, IVF treatment and contraceptives also on the line, pregnant people, people who wish to be pregnant and people who do not are bracing for an uncertain future likely to be determined not by doctors, but courts of law.
“The fight is not over until it is over,” Phillips told The Times. “Until we have full body autonomy.”
