A Texas state court on Friday sided with a group of women and doctors suing the state, saying that exceptions to Texas’ stringent abortion restrictions are too vague and prevented or delayed people from getting abortion care when their lives or health were at risk.
Texas’ SB 8, which passed before Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, bans abortions past six weeks with some exceptions and deputizes citizens to enforce the law by suing people who aid or abet abortion, putting healthcare providers at legal risk. Under the law, doctors can provide abortion care if the health or life of the pregnant person is at risk; but the lack of clarity around what those conditions meant had a chilling effect on doctors in the state — and had serious effects on patients’ health
Judge Jessica Mangrum of the Travis County District Court ruled Friday in Zurawski v. State of Texas that physicians could use their “good faith judgement” to perform an abortion for a patient who has, “a physical medical condition or complication of pregnancy that poses a risk of infection, or otherwise makes continuing a pregnancy unsafe for the pregnant person; a physical medical condition that is exacerbated by pregnancy, cannot be effectively treated during pregnancy, or requires recurrent invasive intervention; and/or a fetal condition where the fetus is unlikely to survive the pregnancy and sustain life after birth,” according to the ruling.
The Texas Attorney General’s office filed an appeal in the case on Friday night, staying the injunction while the case is on appeal, according to the New York Times, and accusing Mangrum of trying “to override Texas abortion laws.”
Mangrum’s injunction would block SB 8’s vigilante enforcement mechanism from being enacted against any patients seeking abortions for medical reasons or against the physicians who perform those procedures — and furthermore states that doing so would violate pregnant people’s rights under Texas’s…
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