‘What does it mean for my girls?’ Emergency physician Jennifer Avegno talks with her daughter about the impact of Louisiana’s abortion ban
As an emergency physician and the director of the New Orleans Health Department, Dr. Jennifer Avegno has experienced the sweeping impact of Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban on public health. But in June 2022, when she first learned that the United States Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, her first thought was for her three daughters.
“Oh God, what is the world going to be like for them? That is a lot of what I was feeling,” she recounted to her daughter Lucy Wagner, 19, two years later.
“I was nervous for you on the other side of it, criminalizing health professionals … that one day you were going to go to work and you were going to help a pregnant woman … and then I would find out that something happened to my mom,” Wagner remembered.
The mother-daughter duo sat down for a conversation recorded by StoryCorps Studios, part of Abortion in America’s collection of interviews with people in Louisiana about the ways in which the state’s abortion ban has affected their lives.
As I started seeing patients in the ER having miscarriages in the millions of ways women have miscarriages, I realized this is a really nuanced topic. It’s not black and white, as it’s being portrayed.
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