WENDY DAVIS, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor who became a feminist heroine when she mounted a 13-hour filibuster to block abortion restrictions, has revealed she terminated two of her own pregnancies.
The abortions are disclosed in a new memoir designed to boost her flagging campaign. She writes in Forgetting to be Afraid that she had an abortion in 1996 after an examination revealed the foetus had a brain abnormality.
She also describes terminating an ectopic pregnancy two years earlier.
Both pregnancies happened before Davis, a state senator from Fort Worth, Texas, launched her political career and when she was already the mother of two young girls.
The foetus can rarely survive an ectopic pregnancy, which can endanger the mother’s life. But, Davis writes, it is “technically considered an abortion, and doctors have to report it as such”.
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In the 1996 abortion Davis said she and her then husband, Jeff, opted to terminate after doctors found a brain defect that would have left the baby girl deaf, blind and in a permanent vegetative state. She writes that an “indescribable blackness followed”.
Davis is trailing Greg Abbott, attorney-general of Texas, in the race to replace the state’s Republican governor, Rick Perry, a potential 2016 presidential candidate. The election is in November.
During Davis’s epic filibuster in June 2013 thousands watched the single mother block legislation amid chaotic scenes that prompted President Barack Obama to tweet: “Something special is happening in Austin tonight.”