Catalina Leano, a licensed vocational nurse at Houston Women?s Reproductive Services, performs an ultrasound with the clinic doctor present, to find out whether the girl is lower than six weeks pregnant and eligible to have an abortion in Texas. The patient moved from Virginia every week ago and took a pregnancy test early within the morning and made an appointment on the clinic the identical day as a result of Texas recently enacting the strictest anti-abortion law in the USA, in Houston, Texas, October 1, 2021.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
Women in Texas with complicated pregnancies shall be exempted from a state abortion ban under a brief injunction issued on Friday, with the judge citing an absence of clarity on the ban’s medical exemptions.
Travis County District Court Judge Jessica Mangrum in her ruling sided with women and doctors who sued Texas over the abortion ban.
“The Court finds that there’s uncertainty regarding whether the medical exception to Texas’ abortion bans … permits a physician to supply abortion care where, within the physician’s good faith judgment and in consultation with the pregnant person, a pregnant person has a physical emergent medical condition,” Mangrum said within the ruling.
The temporary injunction will stand until the lawsuit against Texas is complete, unless a better court intervenes. The injunction is anticipated to be appealed.
The judge ruled that doctors can’t be prosecuted for application of “good faith judgment” for provision of abortions for physical medical conditions including: people who pose infection risk or make pregnancy unsafe, where the fetus will not be prone to survive the pregnancy after birth, and where a medical condition can’t be effectively treated while pregnant or requires “recurrent pervasive intervention.”
“Today’s ruling alleviates months of confusion around what conditions qualify as medical emergencies under Texas’ abortion bans, giving doctors permission to make use of their very own medical judgment in determining when abortion care is required,” the Center for Reproductive Rights, the group that brought this lawsuit, said in an announcement.
Several women who said they were denied abortions despite grave risk to their lives sued the state of Texas in March, in the primary apparent case of pregnant women suing over curbs imposed after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.
The injunction is effective immediately. The judge set a trial date of March 25.
Abortion was banned with very limited exceptions in Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court last 12 months stripped away national abortion rights. State legislatures are wrestling with how much to limit or expand abortion access after that call.
