When Miranda Michel, a mother in rural Texas, was four months pregnant with twins, she was told that the babies would not survive: their spines were twisted, organs were undeveloped or in the wrong place, and the ultrasound showed other malformations. But the state’s abortion laws—which make no exception for lethal fetal anomalies—required Michel to carry the pregnancy to term. Reporter Eleanor Klibanoff and photographer Shelby Tauber capture Michel’s devastating journey, up to the pregnancy’s painful end—showing loud and clear how cruel abortion laws shatter the lives of women and their entire families.
Miranda’s twins were developing without proper lungs, or stomachs, and with only one kidney for the two of them. They would not survive outside her body. But they still had heartbeats. And so the state would protect them.
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