Two years ago, an abortion ban made them teen parents
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2023
⏱️ 26 minutes
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Summary
Today on “Post Reports,” we follow up with Brooke and Billy High, two teenagers compelled into parenthood by the Texas abortion ban. Now, they’re caring for their twin daughters in a new city — and trying their best to hold it all together.
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Last summer, The Post’s abortion reporter Caroline Kitchener told the story of a teenager who wanted an abortion and ended up having twins because of the Texas abortion ban. The story — which “Post Reports” also covered — went viral.
“The fascinating thing about that story for me was that people read it in two completely different ways,” Caroline Kitchener tells guest host Will Oremus. “You had antiabortion people saying, ‘This is wonderful. There are two babies in the world. Their parents love them. They got married. He’s joining the military,’ … kind of holding them up as poster children for what an abortion ban can do. But on the other side, you had abortion rights advocates saying, ‘This is a tragedy. She dropped out of school, this ambitious young woman; her life in so many ways is just so much more difficult.’”
In today's episode of “Post Reports,” Caroline catches up with Brooke and her now-husband Billy as the two 19 year-olds try to make marriage and parenthood work.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I started covering abortion full time for the post two years ago, right around the |
| 0:06.4 | time when the Texas Heartbeat Act went into effect, banning abortion after about six weeks |
| 0:11.8 | of pregnancy. |
| 0:13.9 | That's before a lot of people even know that they're pregnant. |
| 0:16.8 | The lone star stayed now home to the Texas Heartbeat Law, which bans most abortions, it |
| 0:22.0 | outlaws abortions, once a doctor detects a fetal heartbeat. |
| 0:26.3 | The fetal heartbeat bill led to protests across Texas. |
| 0:29.8 | The most serious threat to Roe v. Wade, which guaranteed... |
| 0:32.7 | It might be hard to remember this now, because so much has happened since, but even before |
| 0:38.1 | Roe v. Wade was overturned last June, nine months before Roe v. Wade was overturned last |
| 0:44.4 | June, this law changed everything in Texas. |
| 0:50.4 | This is Caroline Kitchener. |
| 0:52.0 | She covers abortion for the post. |
| 0:54.0 | At the time, I was reporting a lot on people who were frantically trying to leave the state |
| 0:58.9 | driving many, many hours to get abortions in New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma. |
| 1:05.2 | But I kept wondering about the people who couldn't leave Texas or decided not to. |
| 1:11.3 | What would happen to them? |
| 1:13.4 | It's that question that first brought me to Broken Billy. |
| 1:25.0 | Broken Billy became teenage parents because of the Texas abortion ban. |
| 1:31.0 | Brooke wanted to get an abortion, but she couldn't, and they now have twins. |
| 1:37.0 | I wrote a story about Broken Billy and their daughters more than a year ago. |
| 1:47.8 | The question I had back then was, really, can they make this work? |
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