An expectant Louisiana woman who is carrying a skull-less fetus that would die almost immediately after birth has cemented plans to travel to North Carolina to terminate her pregnancy, she said on Friday.

Nancy Davis, 36, has been facing a choice of either carrying the fetus to term or traveling several states away for an abortion after she says her local medical provider would not perform the procedure amid confusion over whether the state’s abortion ban outlawed it.

Standing on the steps of Louisiana’s capitol building in her home town of Baton Rouge, Davis announced that her trip would be next week. The trip is being financed by more than $30,000 in donations raised by an online GoFundMe campaign that was launched after she went public with her plight earlier this month.

Her lawyer, the prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, also called on Louisiana’s lawmakers to at least clarify the wording of their abortion ban – or to repeal it altogether – to prevent anyone else there from enduring what Davis and her family had during the last several weeks. He said the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, should call a special legislative session in advance of the regular one scheduled to begin in April of next year to do that if necessary.

“Louisiana lawmakers inflicted unspeakable pain, emotional damage and physical risk upon this beautiful mother,” Crump said, gesturing at Davis, who was accompanied Friday by her partner, Shedric Cole, their young daughter and her two stepchildren. “They replaced care with confusion, privacy with politics and options with ideology.

“Ms Davis was among the first women to be caught in this crosshairs of confusion due to Louisiana’s rush to restrict abortion. But she will hardly be the last.”

Louisiana is among the American states that have outlawed abortion with very few exceptions following the US supreme court’s decision in June to strip away nationwide abortion rights that had been in place since the 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade.

Davis was about 10 weeks pregnant in late July when an ultrasound at Woman’s hospital in Baton Rouge revealed that her fetus was missing the top of its skull, a rare but devastating condition known as acrania that kills babies within days – if not minutes – of birth.

Because Louisiana’s list of conditions justifying an exception from the state’s abortion ban did not explicitly include acrania, hospital officials turned down terminating Davis’ pregancy, apparently fearing they could be subject to prison time, costly fines and forfeiture of their operating licenses if they performed the procedure.

“Basically, they said I had to carry my baby to bury my baby,” Davis remarked Friday.

Her providers said her Medicaid insurance would not cover the procedure anyway and directed her to an abortion clinic.

Yet Louisiana’s abortion clinics have announced plans to leave the state amid brewing legal battles over whether the ban can constitutionally be enforced.

After Davis went public with her story and retained Crump to help her sort out her options, the state senator who authored Louisiana’s abortion ban, Katrina Jackson, has insisted that Woman’s hospital could have legally terminated Davis’s pregnancy. The statute contains a general exception for fetuses that cannot survive outside their mothers’ wombs.

However, Crump said, that exception was clearly not worded in a way that gave Davis’s providers confidence that they could proceed without potentially being heavily penalized.

Davis instead raised money through a GoFundMe that attracted more than 1,000 donors and booked arrangements to travel with Cole, her partner, to North Carolina. That state – more than 900 miles from Baton Rouge – allows abortions up to the 20th week of pregnancy.

“The law in Louisiana is clear as mud,” Crump said. “We’re going to prepare ourselves to go out of state and trust the people who are saying they can perform the termination of the pregnancy safely and without anybody having to risk going to prison.”

Cole on Friday asked the public to imagine what Davis and the rest of her family had experienced since learning of their baby’s fatal diagnosis and being forced to make the decision to head to North Carolina to abort the baby whom the couple had been expecting.

“It’s really complex – it’s really difficult,” Cole said. “From afar, it’s really easy to have an opinion about something … but you don’t understand how complex it is” until you personally go through it.

Davis, for her part, said: “This is not fair to me, and it should not happen to any other woman.

“Being a mother starts when the baby is inside the womb, not on the outside, [because of] the attachment and everything that comes with it. As a mother, as a parent, it’s my obligation to have my children’s best interests at heart.”