When Ashley Brandt and her husband learned she was pregnant with identical twin girls in 2022, she was ecstatic. But one twin's diagnosis with acrania — a rare, fatal congenital disorder characterized by the full or partial absence of cranial bones — sent Brandt's world into a grief-stricken tailspin. It also meant that the lives of both her and her viable child were now at risk. 

Brandt and her twins' circumstances didn't qualify for an exception under Texas' Senate Bill 8 abortion ban, which forced her to flee the state to access care. With the help of family and friends, Brandt would travel to Colorado for an abortion just two weeks before the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, which she said left her terrified that her loved ones or medical team could face consequences. 

"I look at my happy, healthy, 2 1/2-year-old daughter, and that enrages me," the Zurawski v. Texas plaintiff told reporters during a virtual press conference earlier this month. "From the moment she was born, I was immediately aware that the state in which my family and my husband's family has resided since the 1800s saw her and I as nothing more than collateral damage."

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Texas state lawmakers have united around two, bipartisan bills that seek to clarify the exceptions to the state's strict abortion ban and unify it's scattershot abortion laws. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, at least three women have died in Texas as a result of its abortion ban, which outlaws abortion at all stages of pregnancy and criminalizes providing an abortion with penalties including life in prison, $100,000-minimum fines and medical license revocation. With the medical exceptions better defined, lawmakers hope to ease physicians' hesitations in performing life-saving abortions and better protect the lives of pregnant people. But Brandt and other abortion access advocates say the bills, as written, won't go far enough.

"SB 8 falsely implied that there would be medical exceptions by using vague language, and the average Texan doesn't realize the false implication until someone they love is in that impossible situation," Brandt said. "It should be no surprise that HB 44 does absolutely nothing to help Texans in situations similar to mine, but it further hurts situations with the looming threat of........

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