When Texas Republicans approved a six-week abortion ban two years ago, it was obvious that the policy would have a dramatic effect on reproductive rights across the Lone Star State. It was also obvious that the ban would create important legal fights.
One came to the fore early last week. The New York Times reported:
Five women who say they were denied abortions despite grave risks to their lives or their fetuses sued the State of Texas on Monday, apparently the first time that pregnant women themselves have taken legal action against the bans that have shut down access to abortion across the country since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. … [The plaintiff’s] often harrowing experiences will put faces to what their 91-page complaint calls “catastrophic harms” to women since the court’s decision in June, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion after five decades.
It’s worth emphasizing for context the women who filed this case actually wanted to be pregnant — until they learned about their tragic circumstances, including two fetuses that had no skulls.
Legal filings can sometimes be dry and technical, but this lawsuit is a qualitatively different kind of document. As my MSNBC colleague Jordan Rubin explained last week, the filing detailed “the gruesome reality of life in a post-Roe America, specifically in Texas, where, as the suit alleges, not only the plaintiffs but ‘countless other pregnant people have been denied necessary and potentially life-saving obstetrical care because medical professionals throughout the state fear liability under Texas’s abortion bans.’”
In one especially notable example, one of the five women suing the state “was forced to wait until she was septic to receive abortion care, causing one of her fallopian tubes to become permanently closed.”
Yes, under the GOP-imposed law, Texas physicians are able to terminate pregnancies after six weeks if there’s “substantial” harm to pregnant…
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