When Amanda Zurawski read about the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that imperiled in vitro fertilization services, she knew what she had to do. “We don’t feel like IVF is protected,” she says. “And we made the immediate decision to get our embryos out of here.”

Zurawski lives in Texas, one of the Republican states that banned abortion when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022. As Texas’s so-called “trigger ban” went into effect on Thursday, August 25, 2022, Zurawski began to experience pregnancy complications. “I was denied an abortion that I needed in order to prevent getting really sick,” she says. On Friday, she developed sepsis and required emergency care; at that point, she qualified for a medical exception and received abortion care.

“This is a baby that we had tried for years to conceive and we had undergone grueling treatment to get her,” she says, calling it “the most horrific experience of my life.”

Zurawski is now the lead plaintiff in a high-profile lawsuit against the state of Texas. “We’re literally asking for the bare minimum,” she says on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive. “We are asking for the court to clarify the language in the law to more clearly define what constitutes a ‘medical exception.’ And the fact that it’s taking them this long to say whether or not they’re going to do that is insane.”

Echoing what many doctors and lawyers have said about the matter, Zurawski argued that antiabortion laws in Texas, Alabama, and other states are deliberately vague. “The laws are written to intimidate and to confuse,” she says.

Zurawski says she was still in the hospital ICU when she started asking when she could try to get pregnant again. Doctors said IVF was her best option. “If you haven’t been through IVF, if you don’t have experience with it, you don’t know how difficult it is,” Zurawski says. “There’s so much anxiety. It’s painful. It’s difficult on your hormones, on your mood, on your body. It’s very isolating. It’s lonely.” And yet, she says, “thank goodness that it exists and it’s an option for people like me.”

The Alabama ruling that put IVF services at risk outraged Zurawski and other activists. “I hear these interviews with politicians in Texas and Alabama and Tennessee and, you know, similar states, where it’s become very clear that they don’t even have any idea what they’re talking about,” she said. “They’ve never been through IVF. They don’t understand how it works. Yet they’re getting in the way of my family-planning journey. And they have no idea what they’re talking about. Who are they to tell me what I can and can’t do, when they don’t even understand the science?”

Lawmakers in Alabama scrambled to contain the fallout from the anti-IVF ruling by passing legislation this week that would provide legal protections to doctors. But the bills are only a Band-Aid. Zurawski says she fears “what could happen in additional states” because “the slope here is so slippery and it’s so steep and we don’t know what they’re going to come for next.”

Zurawski is blunt about the actions of antiabortion politicians and judges: “They’re trying to control us.” She adds, “I can’t begin to imagine what goes on in these people’s brains, but I can tell you that I do think it’s about control because look at my situation, right? On the one hand, they’re telling me I can’t get an abortion unless I almost die because they’re pro-life, right? But then on the other hand, I need IVF to help create a family, and they are very likely going to do something that stipulates or restricts the way in which I can do that. So, they’re talking out of both sides of their mouth here, and I fall into both categories, and in both scenarios, they’re telling me that I can’t do what I want to do.”

Last year Zurawski attended President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address as a guest of first lady Jill Biden. And in January she spoke at a Biden reelection rally, where she recounted her near-death experience and introduced the president. The Biden-Harris campaign is “making reproductive rights a pillar of the campaign,” she says, and it is “so heartening and so exciting to see.”