A lawsuit, recently filed in a Texas trial court, seeks to answer a question that has vexed lawyers, doctors, hospitals, and patients ever since the Supreme Court permitted the state to ban abortions: When can a Texas patient obtain an abortion in order to save their life or ward off serious health consequences?
Texas is famously one of the most anti-abortion states in the country — you may remember the Supreme Court fight over the 2021 Texas law that sics litigious bounty hunters on abortion providers — but even in Texas, it is legal for doctors to perform an abortion when one is necessary to protect the health or life of a patient.
Or, at least, it is supposed to be legal.
Before the new lawsuit was filed, stories about patients who suffered because they were unable to obtain abortions were already common. One Texas woman had a nonviable pregnancy that risked giving her a life-threatening infection, and was told she had to wait, as her body discharged blood clots and a strange-smelling yellow liquid, until she became sick enough to have an abortion. Her doctors eventually agreed to induce labor after her vagina started to emit a dark, foul-smelling fluid.
Another Texas woman, whose fetus had multiple defects that would prevent it from living more than a few minutes after birth, says she had to flee to New Mexico to receive an abortion that would protect her from blood clots, cancer, and a potentially fatal condition known as preeclampsia. Her doctor later warned her not to get pregnant again in the state of Texas.
Nor are these kinds of stories limited to Texas. Similar stories abound in states like Tennessee, Louisiana, and Idaho, which also have very strict abortion laws.
In theory, even after the Supreme Court’s anti-abortion decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), medically necessary abortions remain legal in all 50 states. Texas law, for example, is supposed to permit abortions when a patient is “at risk of death”…
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