Denial of care nearly killed her. Now she’s warning PA how Project 2025 will impose national abortion ban

Amanda Zurawski and members of the Pennsylvania Women’s Health Caucus warned voters on Thursday Project 2025 can ban abortion nationally. 

Pennsylvania House Speaker Joanna McClinton and members of the Women’s Health Caucus held a press conference outside the Pennsylvania State Capitol on Thursday warning voters how Project 2025 and a second Donald Trump presidency could strip away reproductive freedoms for tens of millions of Americans. 

“We’ve all heard, and most of us at this point have read about Project 2025, the right wing radical agenda to further make our nation take away women’s rights and freedoms all across the country,” McClinton said. “But here in Pennsylvania, the women surrounding me, we are not going to allow anything like that to happen.”

Project 2025 is a 920-page document written by dozens of Trump’s former administration and transition members and right-wing organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA, Conservative Partnership Institute and others, and it wants to use the Comstock Act, an 1870’s anti-obscenity law, to ban the distribution of abortion medication.   

The lawmakers were joined by Amanda Zurawski, who almost died two different times due to Texas’ abortion ban and was speaking on behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign. 

“Project 2025 includes plans to strip away access to medication abortion, which the FDA approved as safe and effective more than 20 years ago,” Zurawski said. 

“It’s widely administered to provide care and miscarriages. And if Trump returns to the White House, his administration could attempt to prosecute doctors and patients for sending or receiving medication in the mail. This is what’s at stake.”

Zurawski, whose story was featured by the Biden-Harris campaign, spent a year and a half undergoing fertility treatment before she finally became pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage two days after Texas’ abortion ban went into effect. Zurawski was denied an abortion and told reporters that she had to wait until she was sick for a doctor to intervene. 

She nearly died, twice. 

“It took three days and a near death crash into septic shock before my doctor could finally provide the healthcare that I desperately needed,” she said. “After stabilizing my vitals enough to deliver our baby willow, I crashed again with another bout of sepsis and was transferred to the ICU.”

“What I went through was nothing short of barbaric and it didn’t need to happen, but it did because of Donald Trump. Over and over again, Donald Trump brags about killing Roe v. Wade. It is unthinkable to me that anyone could cheer on the cruel abortion bans that nearly took my life that he does.”

Even with Pennsylvania’s abortion restrictions that require women to seek counseling to dissuade them from having an abortion and waiting an additional 24 hours for the procedure, the commonwealth has seen a 17% increase in abortions between 2020 and 2023, according to data published by the Guttmacher Institute. 

“Pennsylvanians are proudly pro-choice,” Zurawski said. “Like most Americans, they believe that healthcare decisions belong between a woman and her doctor, but one in this state, no one in this state would be safe or have safe access to reproductive healthcare if Trump makes his way back to the White House this November.”