A lawmaker is looking for ways to expand abortion access
A Texas woman’s epoch of pregnancy: An email from a Texas woman who fought for abortion laws is a threat to her life to get an abortion
As her husband made dinner at their home in Dallas and her kids ran around, Dr. Austin Dennard saw an email on her phone.
The Texas attorney general’s office has fiercely defended the state’s abortion laws and fought the legal challenge. There are exceptions to Texas’s abortion laws, but prosecutors wrote that Dennard failed to state that her baby’s diagnosis posed a threat to her life to get an abortion.
“I didn’t anticipate how much I was going to cry when I read it,” she says. “I just scrolled through it and just cried.”
The Texas ban on abortions for pregnancies with anencephaly diagnoses is back in effect, after all. Today, Texas women must leave the state if they get that diagnosis, as Dennard did, or carry the doomed pregnancy to term, as Casiano did. That means they face all the considerable risks of childbirth to a person’s health and future fertility.
When a pregnant Texas patient has a serious medical problem that does not fit that definition, it is difficult for doctors to decide whether to intervene early or wait, potentially exposing them to fines and lawsuits if they do not provide standard medical care.
The Attorney General’s Brief Address to the Texas Supreme Court relating to the case of an abortion denied to a OB-GYN patient
My husband was crying after giving me a big hug. It felt really good. It felt like a victory but you never thought you’d have to fight for it. “I was reading it through tears, and there’s all this lawyer jargon in it. And so we get internet access, and I’m doing different things on the internet, and we’re trying to understand everything.
Dennard also thought about her OB-GYN patients, and the possibility of speaking to them openly when they face complications. She said it felt good for a person in power to listen to all of the people’s stories and find out how the law should be changed.
“The doctors and the hospitals and their lawyers were reading all of the Texas [abortion] statutes, some of them from the early 1900s, and saying, ‘Look, we can’t tell you what to do here – the language is confusing, the terminology and the definitions are confusing,'” Johnson says.
“I went back to clinic and put on my white coat and just started seeing patients again with the same laws that are in place,” Dennard says. It’s emotional whiplash.
During the July hearing, the assistant attorney general asked the witnesses if Attorney General Ken Paxton had denied them an abortion. Dennard, who was the last patient to testify, retorted, “You know, I never thought to ask him.”
O’Donnell was also present at the hearing in Austin, telling NPR she was there “just to keep an eye on it and watch how it unfolds.” She believes that the laws are clear. “Doctors can exercise reasonable medical judgment; they can provide the standard of care,” she said.
Attorneys for the state of Texas have to submit a filing to the Texas Supreme Court related to the appeal in the case. Then attorneys for the plaintiffs will file a response, and the court will decide whether or not to hear the case. There is no set time frame for this to happen.
Pro-life Associated Obstetricians and Gynecologists: Implications of Johnson’s Proposal for Abortion
The final bill is not as broad as Johnson’s original text. It outlines two conditions where doctors can provide abortions: preterm premature rupture of membranes (the medical term for when someone’s water breaks too early) and ectopic pregnancy (which happens when a fertilized egg implants somewhere besides the uterine lining).
“Standing alongside some incredibly brave women talking about abortion – which is such a taboo subject – and really putting it all out there in such a raw way, is difficult to say the least,” she says.
It has also been energizing to be a part of the lawsuit, she says. She hopes it will change the way people think about abortion restrictions.
Both the Texas Medical Association and the Texas Hospital Association told NPR they were involved in helping to pass the bill and were present when Governor Greg Abbott signed it into law. Hughes told National Review that a number of pro-life groups were present at the signing. It is expected to go into effect on September 1.
There was an assertion that the law was already clear and that doctors were to blame for the uncertainty false, according to Dr. John Thoppil, who was the past president of the Texas Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “If you put the threat of a felony case and losing your license in a very poorly written original law, it is irresponsible to shift that blame back to the physicians who are trying to take care of patients,” he says.
The Minor Miracle: Expanding Irregular Abortion Access in Texas, a Senator Gets Creative in Providing Medical Services
Hughes was a big help in getting the key supporters, according to Johnson. She is glad that they had honest conversations. “This would not have happened without having him in the Senate get this through.”
The bill passed with bipartisan support – in the Senate, it passed unanimously – and made it to the governor’s desk in the last few days of the session. That’s a “minor miracle” according to a blog post by George Christian, senior counsel at the Texas Civil Justice League, who wrote about helping to draft the legislation.
The bill’s House author, Rep. Johnson, and the Senate sponsor, Sen. Hughes, handled things discreetly in their respective chambers.
Johnson is aware of the criticism. There are other things that happen during a pregnancies. “We can accomplish this in this moment.” In this moment, we could get bipartisan agreement of the recognition of ectopic pregnancy and ruptured membrane.”
The Texas legislative session started at the beginning of the year, so she introduced a bill a few weeks later. Originally, the bill broadly allowed doctors to provide “medically necessary” services.
Source: To expand abortion access in Texas, a lawmaker gets creative
The Texas Medical Exception: A State of the Art and an Emergency Physician’s Closed. Dr. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, a Campaign by Rep. Ann Johnson,
Rep. Ann Johnson does not agree that state agencies or organized medical groups could solve these problems with guidance. “You read the black letter of the law,” she says. “When I open the book and it says, ‘Abortion means,’ you don’t get to come later and say, ‘Oh, I really thought abortion meant something else.'”
In her blog post, she added that the Texas health department, the Texas Medical Board, the Texas Medical Association, and the Texas Hospital Association could all ward off these dangerous situations by educating and providing guidance to doctors and hospitals. She wrote that the silence of medical, legal, and bureaucratic organizations that could end the confusion was unconscionable.
Some ardent supporters of the abortion bans are concerned by these stories. “Women are being hurt unnecessarily in the wake of physician confusion and refusal to intervene to protect a mother’s life, even when all obstetricians agree that offering intervention is the standard of care,” Dr. Ingrid Skop wrote in a blog post earlier this year. She is a San Antonio OB-GYN who works for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, part of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. Skop was the only witness called by attorneys for the state in the Zurawski hearing last month.
There is research on how long it takes to receive care. A study published last year documented the outcomes for 28 Texas patients whose water broke too early for the fetus to survive. Doctors waited for the fetal heart to stop or their condition to get worse before they offered abortions. Nearly half of these patients developed a serious condition, including 10 who developed infections, five who needed blood transfusions, and one who required a hysterectomy.
A lawsuit against the state argues that language in the medical exception is vague and confusing, causing hospitals and doctors to delay care, which harms patients. The plaintiffs include 13 patients and two physicians, and they’re represented by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The lead plaintiff, Amanda Zurawski, developed sepsis and nearly died when doctors delayed an abortion.
“If you have a general practitioner or a dermatologist treating psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis of a 34-year-old woman who has no intentions of getting pregnant, and then she gets pregnant six months later and that pregnancy terminates because of that medication,” that doctor could get charged with a felony, Johnson says.
The laws don’t just affect OB-GYNs, Johnson says, pointing to a recent law that imposes criminal penalties on prescribers of certain medications that can cause abortions. She gives the example of methotrexate, a drug used to treat cancer and autoimmune disorders. It can be used to treat a variety of conditions, from ectopic pregnancies to medication abortions.
Texas State Representative Ann Johnson represents District 134, which includes the Texas Medical Center. She says after Texas’s abortion bans took effect, her constituents would stop her when she took walks around the district.
Texas’s Republican Governor Greg Abbott addressed a rally earlier this year, celebrating the abortion bans that took effect after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
