The path to Tennessee politics for Allie Phillips began last year in her doctor’s office. She was 19 weeks pregnant when she got the devastating news about her unborn daughter: only two of the four chambers in her heart were formed.
It was one of many severe congenital issues. The fetus was incompatible with life.
Phillips is 28. She and her husband already have a 6-year-old daughter. They had picked out a name for her sister: Miley Rose.
Phillips already knew there were complications with the pregnancy, and she had been bargaining with the universe for days leading up to this appointment. Maybe there would be treatment for whatever condition her daughter had. A transplant. A cure, even.
That was not the case.
The doctor laid out the options. The first was to stay pregnant and brace for a likely miscarriage. The second was to terminate the pregnancy – at the time, Tennessee had a near-total abortion ban, though it has since added some narrow exceptions. So going out of state was the only possibility. “She couldn’t offer me any resources,” Phillips says.
She and her husband would have to navigate the path forward alone. “I felt like a very small person going through that situation.”
Phillips and her husband live a modest life. Phillips runs a daycare out of her house, and her husband is a forklift mechanic. Flying out of state on a few days’ notice wasn’t something they could do with ease, so they started a fundraiser and asked friends and family for help. After days of frantic phone calls around the country, she made an appointment at a clinic in New York to have the procedure. When she got there, the fetal heartbeat had already stopped. She was in danger of becoming septic.
“I’m very thankful for that clinic because they treated me like a human being,” Phillips says. “Unlike my state did.”
R&I – TP
Ballast
Article URL : https://www.npr.org/2024/02/05/1228326177/abortion-allie-phillips-tennessee-reproductive-rights-pregnancy