Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for Texas governor, reveals in her upcoming memoir she has had two abortions, as reported by the San Antonio Express-News.

One pregnancy was ended in the 1990s after she discovered the developing baby had a severe brain abnormality. Another was ended because it was an ectopic pregnancy, which means the embryo was planted outside the uterus. According to WebMD, an embryo usually will not survive an ectopic condition. These experiences are to be detailed in her upcoming book, “Forgetting to be Afraid,” due to be released next week.

Davis had given a filibuster speech encompassing more than 10 hours last summer to her Texas congress, defeating the Republicans from passing a bill that would have effectively closed most abortion clinics in the state of Texas, as the bill stated that abortions would be illegal after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

Davis said she had thought about revealing her pregnancies during that nearly 13-hour speech, but decided the revelation would overshadow the news of the speech itself; in her words, “such an unexpected and dramatically personal confession would overshadow the events of the day.”

The speech Davis gave has propelled her political career and she is now running for governor of Texas opposite Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott.

Davis was already a mother of two young girls when she had the abortions.

Davis had an abortion after her second trimester as a result of being informed by her doctors that the brain of the developing baby had formed so that the right and left sides were completely separated and that the baby would be deaf, blind, and in a permanent vegetative state, assuming the baby survived delivery. She did not have the abortion until she had sought opinions from several doctors.

She writes in her memior, “I could feel her little body tremble violently, as if someone were applying an electric shock to her, and I knew then what I needed to do. She was suffering.” She adds that an “indescribable blackness followed.”

The other pregnancy of Davis ended because it was determined medically necessary to do so. The termination of her ectopic pregnancy was “technically considered an abortion, and doctors have to report it as such,” said Davis.