On Friday, the Texas state supreme court — made up entirely of Republicans — unanimously rejected a challenge to the state’s terrible abortion ban, finding against a group of doctors and patients who say the law is too vague and thus puts pregnant people in danger.
The court ruled the law is not “too vague,” holding onto the fact that the law says it permits abortion due to a “life-threatening condition” or severe impairment of a major bodily function. They ignored the fact that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of either of these things, and that doctors are absolutely going to err on the side of not providing emergency abortion care when they can be sent to prison if the state decides it wasn’t necessary or they could have waited.
I’m probably giving them too much credit here. They know exactly which side doctors are going to err on and they’re fine with it. That is specifically why the punishment for performing an abortion includes the possibility of life in prison, fines of up to $100,000 and the loss of one’s medical license.
In 2023, a trial court issued an injunction against prosecution of doctors for performing abortions involving “1) any ‘unsafe’ pregnancy, (2) conditions ‘that cannot be effectively treated during pregnancy’ without ‘recurrent invasive intervention,’ and (3) ‘fetal condition[s]’ where the unborn child is ‘unlikely to survive’ or to ‘sustain life after birth.’”
This is obviously a lot more clear and allows for a little bit more wiggle room than the official Texas law, which only permits abortion in cases in which “(1) a pregnant woman has a life-threatening physical condition, and (2) that condition poses a risk of death or serious physical impairment unless an abortion is performed.”
There is, understandably to some degree, a desire to want these things to be cut-an-dried, for there to be some exact point at which something can be declared a “life-threatening condition” and a doctor can feel secure knowing that performing an abortion will not get them sent to prison. But that’s just not usually how things work. The point is that doctors should not have to wait until something becomes life-threatening — they should be able to see that there is a risk that it could be unsafe to continue the pregnancy and be legally allowed to perform an abortion at that point.
This is the problem with people writing laws about things they don’t know the first thing about. This is why the state should stay out of our private medical decisions, full-stop.
The court cannot bring itself to admit the law is bad and dangerous. They have to say, in essence, “The law is fine, and if someone dies or is severely harmed because of it, then that doctor wasn’t following the law!” And the only way to disprove that is for a doctor to actually provide timely care in an emergency situation and be sent to prison over it.
This decision likely means there is going to be no relief found in the court system, and that the future of emergency abortion care now lies with voters. This is, unfortunately, quite unlikely as they won’t be able to vote on a ballot measure to change the state’s constitution unless two-thirds of the state’s heavily Republican legislature decides to allow it. As of February, even 25 percent of Democrats in the state thought the laws outlawing abortion should be even more strict.
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