Abortion Ruling Keeps Texas Doctors Afraid of Prosecution

In ruling that a pregnant woman did not qualify for a medical exception to abortion bans, the Texas Supreme Court left doctors without clear guidance on which cases might pass legal muster.

By J. David Goodman
Dec. 13, 2023

Texas doctors, women and lawyers have been asking the state for nearly two years to clarify what is and what is not allowed under strict, overlapping abortion bans. Lawmakers passed a bill this year that makes some exceptions to the bans clearer, but it wasn’t enough to help doctors decide whether they could legally give a Dallas woman, Kate Cox, an abortion.

Ms. Cox sought permission to end her pregnancy after she learned that her fetus had a fatal genetic condition. A district court judge said she qualified for a medical exception to the bans, but the Texas Supreme Court overturned that decision this week.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/us/texas-abortion-doctor-prosecution.html


Texas Supreme Court heavily scrutinizes both sides in case challenging abortion bans

Bayliss Wagner, Austin American-Statesman
Nov 29, 2023

Texas' highest court heard oral arguments Tuesday in a case that will decide whether medical exceptions to Texas abortion bans are written clearly enough to protect women who face serious health risks during pregnancy.

The 22 plaintiffs in the case include several women forced to wait until they were sick with sepsis, a life-threatening condition, to terminate pregnancies that premature ruptures of membrane had already rendered nonviable; two women who traversed hundreds of miles for abortions of a nonviable twin to protect their and their healthy babies' lives; and a woman forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy to term, then watch her baby's skin turn purple and her eyeballs bleed as she slowly suffocated to death.

Continued:  https://www.statesman.com/story/news/state/2023/11/29/texas-supreme-court-hears-case-challenging-texas-abortion-bans-health-risks-pregnancy-women/71727577007/


‘How sick is sick enough?’ Abortion bans leave providers, patients questioning when care is OK

Saturday, September 2, 2023
By Elise Catrion Gregg | News21

AUSTIN, Texas — Amanda and Josh Zurawski sit in the house they bought last year, the dream home they intended to share with their future daughter.

They’ve told their story too many times now, but they brace themselves to tell it once more — from a room just above the backyard where they will one day plant a tree in memory of the baby who never made it home.
It will be a willow, in honor of the name they chose for their little girl.

Continued: https://nondoc.com/2023/09/02/how-sick-is-sick-enough-abortion-bans-leave-providers-patients-questioning-when-care-is-ok/


USA – You Cannot Hear These 13 Women’s Stories and Believe the Anti-Abortion Narrative

May 22, 2023
By Michelle Goldberg

It’s increasingly clear that it’s not safe to be pregnant in states with total abortion bans. Since the end of Roe v. Wade, there has been a barrage of gutting stories about women in prohibition states denied care for miscarriages or forced to continue nonviable pregnancies.

Though some in the anti-abortion movement publicly justify this sort of treatment, others have responded with a combination of denial, deflection and conspiracy theorizing. Some activists have blamed the pro-choice movement for spooking doctors into not intervening when pregnancies go horribly wrong. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care is not or may not be permitted in these states, leading to provider confusion and poor outcomes for women,” said a report by the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/opinion/abortion-law-texas-lawsuit.html


3 abortion bans in Texas leave doctors ‘talking in code’ to pregnant patients

March 1, 2023
Selena Simmons-Duffin
6-Minute Listen with Transcript

This past fall, when Lauren Miller of Dallas was 13-weeks pregnant with twins, she got horrible news. One of the twins had trisomy 18, a genetic abnormality that causes about 90% of fetuses to die before birth. The other twin was healthy.

She learned from a genetic counselor that continuing to carry both fetuses could put the healthy one at risk. She saw a doctor who specializes in high risk pregnancies who told her: "You can't do anything in Texas and I can't tell you anything further in Texas, but you need to get out of state."

Continued; https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/01/1158364163/3-abortion-bans-in-texas-leave-doctors-talking-in-code-to-pregnant-patients


The Post-Roe Abortion Underground

A multigenerational network of activists is getting abortion pills across the Mexican border to Americans.

By Stephania Taladrid
October 10, 2022

The handoff was planned for late afternoon on a weekday, at an underused trailhead in a Texas park. The young woman carrying the pills, whom I’ll call Anna, arrived in advance of the designated time, as was her habit, to throw off anyone who might try to use her license plates to trace her identity. She felt slightly absurd in her disguise—sun hat, oversized sunglasses, plain black mask. But the pills in her pocket were used to induce abortions, and in Texas, her home state, their distribution now required such subterfuge, along with burner phones and the encrypted messaging app Signal. Since late June, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Texas and thirteen other states had effectively banned abortion, and more were sure to follow. In some of the states, laws that originated as far back as the nineteenth century had been restored. Providing the tools for an abortion in Texas had become a felony that could lead to years in prison, and a fellow-citizen could sue Anna and collect upward of ten thousand dollars for every abortion she was found to abet.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/17/the-post-roe-abortion-underground


USA – Patients face barriers to routine care as doctors warn of ripple effects from broad abortion bans

Medical groups say the new laws are delaying patient access to a range of treatments.

By
ALICE MIRANDA OLLSTEIN and DANIEL PAYNE
09/28/2022

Patients
seeking drugs to treat everything from arthritis to acne at Walgreens and CVS
pharmacies in the dozen-plus states with near-total abortion bans must show
extra documentation to prove that they’re not using the drugs to end a
pregnancy, the companies confirmed to POLITICO. Those who can’t are, in some
cases, being turned away.

The chronic illness advocacy group Global Healthy Living Foundation said its
members in Tennessee, Texas and other states with abortion restrictions have
been refused prescriptions for methotrexate — a drug for patients with lupus
and other illnesses that also can be used to induce an abortion in the case of
an ectopic pregnancy — and they’re lobbying those states’ governors and local
officials to intervene.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/28/abortion-bans-medication-pharmacy-prescriptions-00059228


A Plan Forms in Mexico: Help Americans Get Abortions

Mexican activists plan to provide women in Texas and other U.S. states with information, support — and abortion-inducing pills.

By Natalie Kitroeff
Dec. 20, 2021

GUANAJUATO, Mexico — Verónica Cruz spent years defying the law in Mexico, helping thousands of women get abortions. Now that Mexico has declared that abortion is no longer a crime, Ms. Cruz and activists like her are planning to bring their mission to a country moving in the opposite direction: the United States.

Abortion restrictions have been multiplying across the United States for years, including just over Mexico’s border in Texas. Now the Supreme Court is considering a case that could diminish or completely overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion. That would likely set off new restrictions in at least 20 states.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/world/americas/mexico-abortion-pill-activists.html


Texas Abortion Law Complicates Care for Risky Pregnancies

Doctors in Texas say they cannot head off life-threatening medical crises in pregnant women if abortions cannot be offered or even discussed.

By Roni Caryn Rabin
Nov. 26, 2021

A few weeks after Texas adopted the most restrictive abortion law in the nation, Dr. Andrea Palmer delivered terrible news to a Fort Worth patient who was midway through her pregnancy.

The fetus had a rare neural tube defect. The brain would not develop, and the infant would die at birth or shortly afterward. Carrying the pregnancy to term would be emotionally grueling and would also raise the mother’s risk of blood clots and severe postpartum bleeding, the doctor warned.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/health/texas-abortion-law-risky-pregnancy.html


USA – More Abortion Restrictions Have Been Enacted In The U.S. This Year Than In Any Other

By EMMA BOWMAN
July 9, 2021

More abortion restrictions have been enacted across the U.S. this year than in any previous year, according to an analysis by a group that supports abortion rights.

State legislatures have passed at least 90 laws restricting the procedure in 2021 so far, finds a report released this month from the Guttmacher Institute.

Continued: https://www.wvtf.org/post/new-record-states-have-enacted-90-abortion-restrictions-so-far-year#stream/0