Texas temporarily had to save women's lives and preserve their health.

The "pro-life" movement wasn't happy about it. And they fought back.

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

Hi readers — thanks for your patience with the light posting over the last week. I’m celebrating a milestone birthday and trying to take an actual vacation where I don’t work all day every single day (what an innovation!). You’ll still be getting newsletters from me throughout the week, but I’ll be back in full force next week.

---

It was a big victory for a short time: a Texas judge ruled that doctors can intervene to save pregnant women’s lives and preserve their health without risking criminal penalties, exempting them from the state’s abortion ban.

Then the state of Texas appealed, and the ban went back into place.

The initial ruling sounds like common sense: Even many anti-abortion voters say that they believe doctors should be able to save women’s lives, or manage severe pregnancy complications that necessitate abortion. But the anti-abortion movement, and the Republican politicians who do its bidding, broadly disagrees. That’s why the Texas law — and the laws in many other anti-abortion states — are written the way that they are: To discourage doctors from intervening to help pregnant women.

Doctors, District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum ruled, can use their own “good faith judgement” about when an abortion is medically necessary.

Before her ruling, and now that it’s being appealed, a doctor who exercised their own good-faith judgment and helped a woman in dire medical need end a pregnancy could nevertheless be prosecuted, and faced up to $100,000 in fines and life in prison.

Under the Texas law, it’s not doctors who determine medical necessity; it’s prosecutors and juries. Prosecutors can put doctors on trial, argue that they are criminals for performing life-saving abortions, and put anti-abortion hacks on the stand to parse medical records and argue that, in fact, a particular abortion could have been avoided; juries then get to determine those doctors’ fate.

This ruling is important because it makes clear something the anti-abortion movement doesn’t want to recognize: that efforts to preserve life or health are not black-and-white, and that medicine rarely offers 100% assurances. Doctors need leeway to respond quickly and deftly in emergencies, without worrying about breaking laws penned by medically illiterate ideologues. Patients need to ability to choose their own course of care after weighing the options and risks. Abortion bans make all of that impossible.

It’s important to keep in mind that anti-abortion leaders are penning the laws that anti-abortion politicians are putting into place. If they actually put into action what they profess to believe — that doctors should be able to save women’s lives — they could write laws that allow for doctors to save women’s lives. But they don’t. It takes abortion rights groups suing to allow pregnant women in Texas even basic life and health protections. And this makes clear just how unreasonable the anti-abortion movement really is: Even when groups sue to allow doctors to save women, abortion opponents fight back.

None of this is saving babies. It’s just making women suffer.

xx Jill

*This post has been edited to reflect the state of Texas’s appeal, and the state’s abortion ban going back into place.