A Texas judge ruled on Friday in favor of a group of women who sued the state over the medical exception of its pro-life law in the case known as Zurawski, et al. v. State of Texas, et al. However, the Texas attorney general’s office filed an immediate appeal with the state Supreme Court, effectively blocking the judge’s ruling and leaving the pro-life law in place.
Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum had temporarily blocked state officials and health agencies from enforcing the state’s pro-life law in specific cases, according to Texas Right to Life. The women at the center of the lawsuit argued that the law’s medical exception put their lives in danger due to a lack of clarity. As a result of the ruling, doctors would have been able to commit abortions in emergency medical situations based on their “good faith judgment” — which is what the law allows anyway. But doctors who commit abortions on preborn children due to a serious health diagnosis would also not have faced penalties under Mangrum’s ruling either, according to NPR.
Mangrum wrote that “uncertainty regarding the scope of the medical exception and the related threat of enforcement of Texas’s abortion bans” means that doctors “will have no choice but to bar or delay the provision of abortion care to pregnant persons in Texas for whom an abortion would prevent or alleviate a risk of death or risk to their health… for fear of liability under Texas’s abortion bans.”
What the law says
Yet, the Texas abortion code states, “If an abortion is performed or induced on a pregnant woman because of a medical emergency, the physician who performs or induceds the abortion shall execute a written document that certifies the abortion is necessary due to a medical emergency and specifies the woman’s medical condition requiring the abortion.”
Medical emergency is defined by the law as “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that, as certified by a physician, places the woman in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless an abortion is performed.”
No medical reason for abortion
There is no medical reason for an induced abortion, which is the direct and intentional killing of a preborn child prior to delivery. Even in a medical emergency, the preborn child does not have to be intentionally and directly killed before delivery. When a mother’s life is in danger, the pregnancy can be ended by early delivery without the intent to end the child’s life, which is not considered an induced abortion and is not prohibited by Texas law.
If the child is too young to survive and dies after birth as a result, the delivery is still not legally an abortion. Children born as young as 21 weeks are at times capable of surviving outside the womb when given proper medical care depending on the hospital’s ability to provide that care.
None of the women at the heart of this case needed an induced abortion. Nine of the 13 women wanted an induced abortion due to a diagnosis for their child, stating that the child’s mere existence created a risk for their own lives.
The remaining four women wanted an abortion because their own health was at risk due to a premature rupture of membranes. Their water broke when their children would be too young to survive, and though treatments are available to try to prevent labor, doctors neglected to offer them proper medical care.
In fact, when one of the women, Amanda Zurawksi, whose name is at the center of the case, was sent home with an incompetent cervix, with the amniotic sac “bulging,” and at serious risk of infection, after doctors failed to provide her with standard medical care that would have prevented her from the sepsis that she ended up developing days later.
“We asked all of our doctors and our nurses, isn’t there something you can do, and they said no,” Zurawski explained in a pro-abortion video she participated in. “I couldn’t make the decision for myself, we couldn’t make the decision for our daughter, our doctors couldn’t make the decision. They were just as furious as we were because their hands were tied. Had they acted, they would have been charged with a felony.” (emphasis added)
But in fact, there was something the doctors could have done. An incompetent cervix causes up to 25% of miscarriages in the second trimester, and though there are treatments, those treatments aren’t always successful, especially if labor has already begun. However, induced abortion — the intentional killing of the baby — is not one of those treatments.
Doctors did perform that standard medical procedure — induced premature delivery (not abortion) — only after Zurawski became extremely ill.
Dr. Christina Francis, board member and CEO-elect of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, explained to Live Action News:
As an OB/GYN, I have taken care of many women with cervical insufficiency. It can be a heartbreaking situation and my heart goes out to this couple. While many details about this particular patient’s clinical situation are missing, elective abortion is not a treatment for cervical insufficiency.
Many times, if infection is ruled out, women can be treated with a stitch, called a cerclage, which is placed in her cervix to hold the unborn baby in until he or she can survive outside the mother. An attentive physician should be able to detect signs of infection early and, if present, provide the appropriate treatment – which would be induction of labor. This treatment is not prevented by any abortion restriction in the country.
Spreading false information not only serves to unnecessarily scare women and their families, it has a detrimental effect on their health as well.
A 21-year-old study on the emergency operative closure of the cervix (EOCC) — a cerclage — in cases of incompetent cervix when the amniotic sac is prolapsing as it was with Zurawski, found that “If antibiotic and tocolytic treatment was successful in stopping local infection and contractions, EOCC is an acceptable and mostly successful procedure to prolong pregnancy.”
