Texas Tribune / Miguel Gutierrez Jr.
The Texas Supreme Court docket on Jan. 15, 2020.
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Texas Legal professional Normal Ken Paxton has requested the state Supreme Court docket to intervene and cease a Dallas girl from having an abortion.
Paxton’s workplace petitioned the excessive courtroom simply earlier than midnight Thursday, after a Travis County district choose granted a short lived restraining order permitting Kate Cox, 31, to terminate her nonviable being pregnant. Paxton additionally despatched a letter to 3 hospitals, threatening authorized motion in the event that they allowed the abortion to be carried out at their facility.
That is the primary time an actively pregnant grownup girl has gone to courtroom to get an abortion since earlier than Roe v. Wade was determined in 1973. An analogous case was filed in Kentucky on Friday.
Within the petition, Paxton requested the Texas Supreme Court docket to rule rapidly, saying that “every hour [the temporary restraining order] stays in place is an hour that Plaintiffs consider themselves free to carry out and procure an elective abortion.”
“Nothing can restore the unborn baby’s life that shall be misplaced in consequence,” the submitting stated. “Submit hoc enforcement is not any substitute, so time is of the essence.”
The Texas Supreme Court docket is at the moment additionally contemplating the same case, Zurawski v. Texas, through which 20 girls declare they have been denied medically crucial abortions for his or her difficult pregnancies as a result of state’s new legal guidelines. The state has argued these girls don’t have standing to sue as a result of, not like Cox, they don’t seem to be at the moment searching for abortions.
Within the preliminary lawsuit, Cox’s attorneys with the Middle for Reproductive Rights argued she can not wait the weeks or months it’d take the Texas Supreme Court docket to rule.
Now, the excessive courtroom should take into account lots of the identical arguments as these in Zurawski v. Texas, however on a a lot tighter timeline.
The central query is whether or not a deadly fetal anomaly qualifies a pregnant affected person for an abortion underneath the slim medical exception to the state’s near-total abortion ban. Cox’s attorneys argue that persevering with this nonviable being pregnant poses a risk to her life and future fertility, thus necessitating an abortion.
Travis County District Decide Maya Guerra Gamble agreed, saying it might be a “miscarriage of justice” to pressure Cox to proceed the being pregnant. The state disagreed, telling the Supreme Court docket that Guerra Gamble’s ruling “opens the floodgates to pregnant moms procuring an abortion” past the scope of the medical exception.
Individually, Cox’s lawyer, Molly Duane, despatched a letter to Guerra Gamble, asking her to convey Paxton in for a listening to on his letter threatening authorized motion in opposition to hospitals that enable Cox to have an abortion.
“The repeated misrepresentations of the Court docket’s [order], coupled with specific threats of felony and civil enforcement and penalties, serve solely to cow the hospitals from offering Ms. Cox with the healthcare that she desperately wants,” Duane wrote. “Plaintiffs respectfully request the Court docket maintain a listening to so Defendant Paxton can clarify to Your Honor why he shouldn’t be sanctioned.”
Texas Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, on behalf of President Joe Biden’s re-election marketing campaign, condemned Paxton’s feedback Friday.
“A Texas girl was simply pressured to beg for life-saving well being care in courtroom and now any physician who supplies her the care she urgently wants is being threatened with punishment together with a lifetime jail sentence,” Escobar stated in an announcement. “This story is stunning, it’s horrifying, and it’s heartbreaking.”
This text initially appeared within the Texas Tribune.
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