Dani Mathisen was living in Texas and married to her high school sweetheart. She was thrilled to learn she was pregnant with a baby girl. But at 20 weeks, a fetal anatomy scan revealed devastating news. Her daughter only had one kidney, her spine was so bent that it put pressure on her heart and her brain was formed incorrectly.
The condition was diagnosed as lethal, but under a Texas law imposed just weeks before Mathisen’s scans, abortion was banned at six weeks with no provisions for rape, incest or severe fetal abnormalities, like Dani’s case.
“It wasn’t a question as to what we were going to do,” Mathisen said. “It was a question of how we were going to do it without getting arrested.”
Unable to get treatment in Texas, she traveled to New Mexico – a non ban state – for care.
Texas doctors seemed scared and confused
In 2021, Senate Bill 8 – known as SB8 – went into effect in Texas. It included a novel enforcement method, deputizing citizens to sue people for aiding or abetting an abortion. Successful lawsuits would be rewarded with a $10,000 bounty.
The bill included an exception for medical emergencies, but didn’t define what those were.
Mathisen wasn’t able to get care from her own doctors because they were fearful of the law’s consequences.
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“It wasn’t clear what counted as aiding and abetting somebody getting an abortion,” she said. “So they couldn’t even counsel me and say like, ‘Yes, we recommend you have an abortion or at least look into it, even if you go to another state.’”
Mathisen and her husband turned to her mother, a doctor, for help. Several calls later, her mom secured an appointment for Mathisen to end her pregnancy at a clinic in New Mexico, a non-ban state.
“She put her license on the line for that. Because I’m her baby and that’s what I needed,” Mathisen said. “She booked our plane ticket. She booked our hotel. She called the clinic, got us scheduled, and gave us an envelope of cash.”
Mathisen was afraid to use a credit card or have her name attached to the appointment.
“We paid for the abortion in cash so that there wasn’t a paper trail of our Texas credit cards paying for an abortion,” she said.
The changing legal landscape in Texas
Twenty states banned or severely restricted abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022. Texas went a step further and enacted a trigger law that made performing an abortion a felony.
Under the new, more restrictive law, Texas banned all abortion from conception, except when the mother’s life was in immediate danger.
In 2023, Mathissen joined 19 women with similar stories in a lawsuit against the Texas government for denial of care. The lawsuit did not seek to overturn the bans, but rather to clarify which exceptions were allowed under the law.
The case was rejected by the Texas Supreme Court, but after the women filed their suit, Texas legislators quietly passed a new law to include two exceptions to the ban: one for ectopic pregnancies –when a pregnancy occurs outside the uterus– and the other when a woman’s water breaks prematurely.
Maternal deaths on the rise
Texas has only released maternal death data through 2021, but according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after Texas restricted abortion, maternal deaths rose 61% in Texas from 2019 – compared to 8% nationwide.
Dr. Emily Briggs, who has overseen hundreds of complicated pregnancies in Texas, said women could lose their lives because of Texas’ laws. The threat of prosecution has created such fear that today, most Texas hospitals require physicians consult with staff attorneys when treating complicated pregnancies and even miscarriages.
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“This is not the medical care that those of us in medicine signed up for. This is not what our plan was, or is, when talking to a patient about their care. It should be between me and the patient,” Dr. Briggs said.
Because of these rules, doctors often can’t provide immediate care even when there’s an urgent medical situation.
“In these situations, time is of the essence,” Dr. Briggs said. “She could lose her uterus, she could lose her life because of these situations. And when we have our hands tied, and can’t act appropriately at the medically appropriate time, we can have worsened outcomes.”
Leaving Texas
According to the Guttmacher Institute, more than 34,000 Texas women traveled out of state for care last year. Dr. Eve Espey, the chair of the OB-GYN department at the University of New Mexico Hospital, said they had a 300% increase in out-of-state patients between 2019 and 2023.
“On any given day in 2023, 70-71% of our patients were from Texas,” she said.
Today, women making that journey face even more risks. Six Texas counties have imposed travel bans, which threaten legal action against anyone helping to transport women out of state for abortion services. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit demanding access to the medical records of women leaving the state for that care.
Paxton’s office has not responded to multiple 60 Minutes requests to discuss the issue.
“So many of the patients who come to us that we diagnose with a miscarriage, they’re like, ‘I’m done with Texas. I want my care here. I can’t trust my own doctor to take care of me for a miscarriage…or a pregnancy complication,’” Dr. Espey said.
Dani Mathisen was one of them. After the loss of her baby in Texas, she and her husband moved to Hawaii to begin her OB-GYN residency and start a family.
“I did not want to be pregnant in Texas, absolutely not,” she said. “I think I know too much about what can go wrong in a pregnancy to feel comfortable being pregnant in Texas.”
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Earlier this year, the Mathisens welcomed Emerson, a healthy baby girl.
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