Some laws only work when they're convenient for the lawmakers. Salia Issa, a prison guard in Texas, is learning this the hard way. Last year, she had what felt like a contraction right after she arrived to work at the prison in Abilene, Texas. At seven months pregnant, Issa immediately alerted her supervisors of her situation. But because there was no one to replace her, she wasn't allowed to leave her post.
By the time she got to the hospital two hours later, her fetus had no heartbeat. Now she's suing on the unborn child's behalf, but the state isn't sure if the fetus counts as a person.
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During her time at work, Issa repeatedly asked for relief but was refused. One of her supervisors even tried to shame her for lying about her pain, the federal lawsuit she filed against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and prison officials alleges.
"You just want to go home," one of her supervisors allegedly told her.
When she was finally able to get to the hospital, she was rushed into emergency surgery because doctors couldn't find a heartbeat. Doctors told her that if she had gotten there earlier, they could have saved her child.
Almost a year later, Issa and her husband Fiston Rukengeza, are suing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the three supervisors who refused to let her leave work — Brandy Hooper, Desmond Thompson, and Alonzo Hammond. The couple is filing the lawsuit on behalf of themselves and their unborn child. They argue that the state violated state and federal laws as well as the U.S. Constitution, which directly contributed to their child's death. They're seeking money to cover medical and funeral expenses in addition to pain and suffering.
The prison agency as well as the Texas district attorney's office is trying to argue that the prison shouldn't be held accountable for the stillbirth because they didn't break the law. They also argue that the fetus didn't have rights as a person.
This is the same state that alleges "unborn children" should be recognized as people with equal rights. Texas' own governor, Greg Abbott, has claimed the state's abortion bans protect "every unborn child with a heartbeat."
"Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the Fourteenth Amendment does the same," the state's attorney's wrote in a legal footnote from March of this year, noting that Issa's stillbirth happened before the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Issa's attorney, Ross Brennan, wrote in a court filing that the way the state is responding is "nothing more than an attempt to say — without explicitly saying — that an unborn child at seven months gestation is not a person."
But for more than 20 years, Texas state legislation passed by lawmakers and defended by the same attorney general's office has alleged that "unborn children" are to be recognized as people starting at fertilization.
"This Court need not weigh into the difficult question of whether, post-Dobbs, an unborn child possesses constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment," Benjamin Dower with the attorney general's special litigation office wrote in a January filing. "Even if he or she does, that right was not clearly established on November 15, 2021."
Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, told ABC News: "This would not be the first time that the state has sought to claim to support the right to life of all fetuses, yet to act quite differently when it comes to protecting the health and safety of such fetuses other than in the very narrow area of prohibiting abortions."
Mary Ziegler, a legal historian focused on abortion and fetal rights at the University of California, Davis, told CBS News that she couldn't understand why Texas wouldn't use the case to uphold their values, saying, "We don't treat unborn children like this in the state of Texas."
