‘I’m carrying it to bury it': Louisiana woman to make tough decision over her skull-less foetus abortion

Nancy Davis, 36, a pregnant Louisiana woman, is faced with the decision of carrying a skull-less child to term or travelling to another state for an abortion. Davis has retained an attorney as she becomes the most recent personification of the agonising choices some women are facing in the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision to abolish universal access to abortion in June. With very few exceptions, most states have prohibited abortion, including Davis’s native state.

Davis, after a 10-week scan, revealed that the foetus was missing the top of its skull, acrania, a condition which generally kills within minutes or hours of delivery. Davis admitted publicly aborting her child. The hospital treating Davis refused to end her pregnancy as acrania was not listed on Louisiana’s list of ailments requiring an exception for abortion.

The law’s exclusions for foetuses that are not viable outside of a mother’s womb, said Katrina Jackson, the state senator who wrote Louisiana’s abortion ban, argued that the hospital should have been entitled to end Davis’s pregnancy.

Davis’s lawyer, Ben Crump, claimed that Louisiana’s abortion prohibition was difficult to understand and had unfavourable effects. He also claimed that it caused emotional and physical damage to his client and other women in Davis’s position. Davis will be travelling to Florida, where she'll be exempt from the state’s ban to give birth to her second child, who’ll eventually die.

In conversation with WAFB, Davis said, "It’s hard knowing that … I’m carrying it to bury it," the Guardian reported. Davis further stated that lawmakers should account more medical situations like acrania into account.

Crump said, "Ms. Nancy Davis was put in a horrifically cruel position," with unimaginable mental suffering and increasing body peril having been endured by Davis.

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