THE HORRIFIC STORIES are pouring in. A Texas woman’s water breaks at 18 weeks, leaving the fetus’s chance of survival “as close to zero as you’ll ever get in medicine,” according to one expert. Yet she must wait until she is hemorrhaging profusely and burning with fever — that is, not dead but almost — before the doctors agree that it’s legal to perform an abortion. A Tennessee resident learns that her baby’s “brain matter [is] leaking into the umbilical sac,” gravely threatening her own health. She is forced to travel 200 miles to another state where doctors may take the fetus from inside her. A Wisconsinite bleeds for more than 10 days from an incomplete miscarriage because the emergency room staff fears that performing the standard-of-care uterine evacuation will be against the law.

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It was in the liminal space between hyper-restriction and complete prohibition that 31-year-old dentist Savita Halappanavar died of septicemia in an Irish hospital in 2012. Her death helped propel the Irish abortion decriminalization movement to victory six years later. With extremists gunning to eliminate all exceptions to abortion bans, Medical Students for Choice Executive Director Pamela Merritt worries that restoring abortion rights in the U.S. may require a similar sacrifice. “We’re going to have to see what happened in Ireland, a completely preventable death,” Merritt said. “It will take more than one.”