The Texas Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Friday to uphold the state’s near-total abortion ban, denying claims that the law risks the lives of Texans with severe pregnancy complications.
“Texas law permits a life-saving abortion,” the majority opinion written by Justice Jane Bland reads. “The law permits a physician to intervene to address a woman’s life-threatening condition before death or serious physical impairment are imminent.”
The ruling comes following the lawsuit against Texas’s anti-abortion statute filed by Amanda Zurawski, who was 18 weeks pregnant when she suffered from a preterm prelabor rupture of membranes.
Doctors in Texas refused to terminate Zurawski’s pregnancy during this life-threatening condition, and she spent three days in the intensive care unit after developing sepsis. Zurawski was one of President Joe Biden’s guests at the 2024 State of the Union address.
Twenty-one other Texas women and several doctors joined the lawsuit, saying that the lack of clarity on when an abortion procedure would be medically necessary required physicians to wait until the complication was severe to the point of death for the mother.
Bland wrote, however, that the anti-abortion statute “does not require that a woman’s death be imminent or that she first suffer physical impairment.”
“A physican who tells a patient, ‘Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed’ and in the same breath states ‘but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances’ is simply wrong in that legal assessment,” Bland wrote.
Zurawski spoke at a press conference outside the state Capitol in Austin, according to the local news outlet the Texas Tribune.
Zurawski said her lawsuit was to fight for fellow Texas women who are “scared and outraged at the thought of being pregnant.”
“The people in the building behind me have the power to fix this, yet they’ve done nothing,” Zurawski said.
Lauren Hall, a co-plaintiff in the case, also spoke at the press conference, saying that although she loves Texas, “it kills me to know that my own state does not seem to care if I live or die.”
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Hall’s fetus was diagnosed with anencephaly, a rare disorder in which the child’s skull and brain do not develop properly in the womb. Although most cases of anencephaly result in natural miscarriage, an estimated 1 in 10,000 infants in the United States are born with the condition, only to live a few hours or days.
Hall and her husband received the diagnosis shortly after the anti-abortion statute went into effect, so they traveled to Seattle to obtain an abortion.
