Texas courts just proved they’re lying about ‘reasonable exceptions’ for abortions | Opinion

If anything has ever proved that the anti-abortion fight isn’t about saving lives or giving exceptions for a mother’s health, it’s the maddening, horrifying, unbelievable story coming out of Texas right now.

Kate Cox is a Dallas-area woman who is seeking an abortion. She is in the 21st week of a nonviable pregnancy, and her case demonstrates that Texas and other states may claim to have “exceptions” to rigid, politically driven abortion laws — but they are not exceptions at all. They’re, in fact, and practice, merely lip service fed to women by Republicans in state leadership, without empathy for the health and safety of mother or child.

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Cox, an incredibly brave woman, seeks to remove a fetus that has no chance at life outside of her womb. Her health is at serious risk, and she has the support of her doctor for the procedure but has spent the last week as the focus of malicious policies that have proliferated in conservative states after the fall of Roe v. Wade by the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Her untenable situation is wholly the result of ill-planned policies created by conservatives to police young women’s bodies and force them to stay pregnant — even after medical knowledge, the family’s wishes and plain common sense all call for an end to the pregnancy.

For everyone who championed state’s rights in the wake of Roe: Where are your excuses now?

Cox was informed two weeks ago that her very much wanted baby was diagnosed with Trisomy 18, a rare genetic disorder that far more often than not results in death before birth. According to the Cleveland Clinic, 95% of fetuses with Trisomy 18 (also known as Edwards Syndrome) don’t survive full term due to complications from the diagnosis, and those that are born live short and tortured lives.

“An Edwards syndrome diagnosis can result in a live birth, but Trisomy 18 most often causes a miscarriage during the first three months of pregnancy or the baby is stillborn,” the clinic says on its website about the syndrome that affects about 1 out of every 2,500 pregnancies.

Cox, already a mother of two, was told by medical professionals that carrying the pregnancy could result in long-term future harm to her fertility — so she sought an abortion with the support of her doctor, and sued the state for the right.

According to the Texas Tribune, the state’s abortion laws “have narrow exceptions only to save the life or prevent ‘substantial impairment of major bodily function’ of a pregnant patient.”

Pregnancy is complicated, painful and scary — and it always has been. It is still far from a safe procedure for many women, and America’s maternal mortality rate is at 33 deaths per 100,000 live births. And that number is rapidly on the rise, compared with 24 deaths per 100,000 in 2020, and 20 in 2019.

Yet some states would rather force a woman to deliver a dead fetus than protect the living woman, including Texas, both Dakotas, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.

Women must sue for the right to an abortion while politicians who barely know what a uterus is, much less what it does, daily decide the fate and health of women’s lives, extending the mental and physical agony of both mother and fetus.

Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble — and it’s no small point that the judge here was a woman — granted the abortion in an emergency hearing on Dec. 7. But then Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asked the Supreme Court of Texas to intervene, and they did, blocking the lower court’s order the very next day and reversing it completely come Monday.

Cox announced that same evening that she would be leaving the state to seek an abortion, fulfilling a nightmare that every woman has feared since the fall of Roe 18 months ago.

“An abortion was not something I ever imagined I would want or need; I just never thought I’d be in the situation I’m in right now,” Cox wrote in an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News on Dec. 6.

“My doctors (…) patiently answered all my questions but never told me what I should do. I asked, what do other women do in this situation? They said some choose to continue the pregnancy and some don’t. I was shocked to learn that if I chose the latter, I couldn’t get an abortion in Texas,” Cox wrote. “These caring doctors were trained to help me, but the new abortion bans in Texas tie their capable hands.”

“I am a Texan. Why should I or any other woman have to drive or fly hundreds of miles to do what we feel is best for ourselves and our families, to determine our own futures?” Cox wrote.

Now that she’s given up on Texas doing the right thing, I hope Cox gets this abortion quickly.

I hope the disordered, diseased cells inside her uterus that jeopardize her health are removed and her bodily autonomy secured by a state that understands women’s health is not up for debate. While it’s not been publicized where Cox has gone for her abortion, she could come here to California, a state that’s been the refuge of many women in her position since Roe fell, and conservative states like Texas have made it impossible to find such healthcare. In California, we recognize the right of pregnant women to make decisions about their healthcare without having to ask permission from a judge.

I hope her family, including the Coxes’ two young children, never have to contemplate a life without their daughter, sister, wife or mother for the sake of evangelical values that have no place in our doctors’ offices.

But mark this case here and now, because Kate Cox’s pregnancy was perfect in every way to test Texas’ kangaroo courts on their abortion “exceptions” and she still failed to receive permission. Why? Because those exceptions don’t exist anywhere other than the paper they’re printed on, and they’re worth just as much.

Perhaps the worst part is that we all know that these same men in charge would never let their daughters or wives suffer in the same way Cox has. These men quietly use their influence, wealth and power to send their loved ones to another state for a short visit, simultaneously ensuring that these laws remain on the books only to punish and stall women with less power, less influence and less money than they possess.

If America didn’t see this hypocrisy before, we absolutely must wake up to it now. Women deserve more than this living hell.