Kate Cox, the Texas woman who fled the state to receive an abortion, made a brief appearance during the Democratic National Convention’s ceremonial roll call Tuesday to voice her support for Vice President Harris and warn of former President Trump’s risk to abortion rights.
“I’m Kate Cox, and I love being a mom. I have two beautiful children, and my husband and I have always wanted a third. But when I got pregnant, doctors told us our baby would never survive, and if I didn’t [receive] an abortion, it would put a future pregnancy at risk,” Cox said during the roll call for Texas on Tuesday night.
“But Trump didn’t care, and because of his abortion bans and I had to flee my home,” she continued. “There’s nothing pro-family about abortion bans. There’s nothing pro-life about letting women suffer and even die today because I found a way to access abortion care.”
Cox revealed she is pregnant again, and her baby is due in January, which she noted could be “just in time” to see Vice President Harris sworn in as president should she win in November.
Cox, who is from the Dallas area, made national headlines last year when she sued for the right to terminate a nonviable pregnancy and then left Texas to get abortion care.
Cox was more than 20 weeks pregnant with a fetus that had been diagnosed with trisomy 18, a chromosomal anomaly that leads to miscarriage, stillbirth or the death of the infant within hours, days or weeks after birth.
Doctors informed her that carrying the pregnancy to term would likely risk her fertility, and she and her husband said they wanted to have more children. But the doctors, afraid of prosecution or losing their medical licenses under the state’s near-total ban, refused to provide an abortion until the fetus died.
Texas is one of more than a dozen states that quickly banned abortion at nearly all states of pregnancy after Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022.
She filed a lawsuit in response, in what was is believed to be the first attempt by an individual woman to challenge the state’s abortion ban since Roe was reversed.
A district court granted her permission, but the state Supreme Court paused the ruling the following day. Cox did not have time to wait given her diagnosis, her lawyers said, and she left the state to get an abortion before the court ultimately ruled against her.
Cox joined first lady Jill Biden earlier this year for President Biden’s State of the Union address.