Texas judge briefly lifts abortion ban for medical emergencies

On Friday, a Texas judge awarded a temporary injunction in favour of a group of women and physicians who filed a case challenging the state’s abortion regulations.

The judgement was later delayed when the Texas Attorney General’s office filed an appeal. The ruling of Judge Jessica Mangrum has been stayed until the complaint is considered on its merits at a trial scheduled to begin next March.

The Centre for Reproductive Rights filed the action, claiming that the way medical exclusions are specified under Texas law is ambiguous, instilling fear in doctors and generating a “health crisis.”

In her judgment, Mangrum wrote she agreed the women were “delayed or denied access to abortion care because of the widespread uncertainty regarding physicians’ level of discretion under the medical exception to Texas’s abortion bans.”

She ordered that physicians cannot be prosecuted for exercising their “good faith judgment.”

Instead, doctors should be allowed to determine what they felt constituted medical emergencies that would risk a woman’s “life and/or health (including their fertility),” she said.

First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster said in a statement that the state filed an appeal that “stays an activist Austin judge’s attempt to override Texas abortion laws pending a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court.”

Last month, the plaintiffs gave horrifying evidence in court in Austin.

Amanda Zurawski, after whom the case is named, claimed she was denied an abortion despite the fact that her water broke early in her pregnancy, indicating that a miscarriage was unavoidable.

Zurawski said her doctor told her that she “couldn’t intervene, because the baby’s heart was still beating and inducing labor would have been considered an illegal abortion.”

Zurawski went into life-threatening septic shock and the fetus was stillborn.

The suit is the first brought on behalf of women denied abortions since the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to the procedure just over a year ago.

Texas physicians found guilty of providing abortions face up to 99 years in prison, fines of up to $100,000 and the revocation of their medical license.

A state “trigger” ban went into effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, prohibiting abortions even in cases of rape or incest. Texas also has a law that allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids an abortion.

The lawsuit asks the court to create a binding interpretation of the “medical emergency” exception in the law and argues physicians should be allowed to exercise “good faith” judgments on the qualifying conditions for an abortion, rather than leaving this to state lawmakers.

The Texas attorney general’s office, on the other hand, says the measures sought by the complaint would effectively nullify its bans.

The medical exception proposed by the plaintiffs “would, by design, swallow the rule,” its lawyers argued in their written response.

“It would, for example, permit abortions for pregnant females with medical conditions ranging from a headache to feelings of depression.”