Friday, October 27, 2023

VP Backs Texas Abortion Lawsuit

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The Biden administration has voiced its support for a lawsuit filed against Texas’s abortion ban by five women who were denied reproductive healthcare in the state. Vice President Kamala Harris issued a statement on Tuesday calling the women’s stories “devastating”. The lawsuit, filed on Monday, seeks an injunction against Texas’s abortion ban because of what it calls “uncertainty” in the law’s language. Texas currently has a near-total ban on abortion, enacted under Senate Bill 8 (SB 8), which took effect in September 2021. However, the law includes an exception for medical emergencies. The plaintiffs have called on the District Court in Travis County, Texas, to issue guidance “clarifying the scope” of the exceptions to the state’s abortion laws.

This is believed to be the first instance where pregnant women have led a lawsuit against the limitations since the Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe v Wade in June 2022. That decision ended the constitutional right to abortion, which had been in effect for nearly 50 years. Texas is one of 13 US states to have a near-total abortion ban. Many of them are clustered in Republican-led areas of the south: Several of Texas’s neighbours, including Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas, likewise have near-total restrictions.

Each of the five women’s cases is explained in the lawsuit. One of the plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, had been trying to conceive a child with her husband for years. She finally got pregnant in 2022, but 17 weeks into the pregnancy, her cervix started to dilate prematurely. Her water broke and she was soon admitted to an emergency room. Doctors kept her overnight in the hope she would go into premature labour, but Zurawski was told that, under Texas’s abortion ban, there was no other medical care the hospital could provide. Doctors made it clear the fetus would not survive, but faced with an uncertain delivery that could last hours, days or even weeks, the hospital sent Zurawski home. There, she developed sepsis, a serious and sometimes fatal condition. Only then could the doctors provide an abortion.

In septic shock, she was admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) and treated for three days. But the infection caused scar tissue so severe that one of her fallopian tubes became permanently closed. Another woman mentioned in the lawsuit, Lauren Miller, was pregnant with twins, one of whom had abnormalities that made the fetus unlikely to survive, including limited brain development and an incomplete abdominal wall. But despite health issues that threatened both Miller and the second fetus, doctors in Texas felt unable to abort the twin.

Other women in the lawsuit described stress, anxiety and depression as they were forced to seek abortions outside the state to avoid potentially life-threatening health crises. Some also had to navigate the logistics of travel while contending with the possibility of septic shock or premature labour. “Abortion bans are hindering or delaying necessary obstetrical care,” the lawsuit reads.

A spokesperson for Texas’s Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a statement via email responding to the lawsuit. In it, Paxton’s office affirmed that he is “committed to doing everything in his power to protect mothers, families and unborn children, and he will continue to defend and enforce the laws duly enacted by the Texas Legislature”. The Democrat-led White House blasted the “continued attacks on women’s healthcare” in a press briefing on Tuesday. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tied Monday’s lawsuit to a bill introduced in Florida on Tuesday to ban nearly all abortions after six weeks. She called its contents “horrifying details of needless pain, all because of extreme efforts by Republican officials to take away a woman’s ability to make her own healthcare decisions”.

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