Review: The war over healthcare rights gets a human face in the undeniable ‘Zurawski v Texas’

It’s a single-issue presidential election for a galvanized percentage of Americans who see the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade for the dire healthcare decision it is. In states like Texas, women instantly became less safe and more likely to die, even if they wanted children.

For anyone who needs a gut-punch primer in what the lack of reproductive freedom looks like now, the propulsive documentary “Zurawski v Texas” from co-directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault is here to put your voting decisions into sharply delineated, heart-rending focus.

When Austinite Amanda Zurawski’s pregnancy turned life-threatening, she was denied abortion care by medical providers scared of legal recriminations from Texas’s unclear, overlapping and threatening antiabortion laws. As a result, she went into septic shock. Surviving with a reduced likelihood of ever becoming pregnant again, she chose last year to sue the state of Texas, spearheading a novel legal challenge that turned her into a flashpoint figure in a post-Roe America just coming to grips with the ramifications of federally unprotected abortion access.

Tasked with strategizing the argument for the court was Center for Reproductive Rights attorney Molly Duane, who understood that Zurawski’s public airing of her experience would inspire similarly harmed women and families to come forward — and they do. A kind, serious advocate who recognizes the power in a patient-driven battle to get laws repealed, Duane (who carries an “I am the storm” bracelet) also knows how important it is to keep responding to the emotional needs of scarred plaintiffs who relive their losses on the stand, in interviews, in news conferences and with one another.

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One of those brave participants is East Texas mother of four Samantha Casiano, forced to deliver an anencephalic baby with no chance of living, a gauntlet of unnecessary mother-child suffering with a severe impact on Casiano’s mental health, relationships and view toward further pregnancies. To spend screen time with Casiano — who is alternatingly grieving, determined, weary and lost — is to realize you’ll never understand how she copes with the law’s cruelty toward her, only that you’re grateful for the support the legal case gives her.

In one moment of therapeutic solidarity, Casiano smiles recounting the articulate, righteous testimony of co-plaintiff Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN herself who as a patient left the state to terminate her pregnancy following a risk-laden diagnosis. When the state’s attorney tries to undercut Dennard’s claim, rhetorically asking if Texas Atty. Gen. Ken Paxton ever told her personally she couldn’t receive an abortion, Dennard, icy cool, returns the jab with a deadpan, “You know, I never thought to ask him.” (Casiano’s relishing of that moment to the filmmakers’ cameras — “I’m so proud to know her,” she says — is effortlessly heart-tugging.)

The notoriously antiabortion Paxton, though never seen, even in archival footage, eventually gets his say, however, with a wielding of power in response to positive rulings that can only be called vindictive. A staunch enemy like that may never evolve, but in a scene of candor with Zurawski’s parents, her lifelong Republican mom calls herself “a changed person” politically because of her daughter’s ordeal. It doesn’t keep Zurawski from shedding more tears, however — she’s trying to have a baby again as she manages her trauma and stays strong for the case and the other women. One can only compartmentalize so much.

It’s the defiantly unslick, urgent intertwining of teamwork and private grief that lifts “Zurawski v Texas” out of the usual sea of issue documentaries, Crow and Perrault toggling between the high-stakes courtroom drama and raw human tragedy. The film seizes on what’s been inspiring about the women in this fight: You can assemble quite an army for health justice out of the living wounded.