Women with “complicated pregnancies” will be exempted from the abortion ban in the state of Texas (United States) thanks to a temporary court order issued this Friday in which the lack of clarity about medical exemptions from the ban is used as justification for this resolution.
In its ruling, the Court – the Travis County District Court – has reflected that there is – in its opinion – “certainty as to whether the medical exception to the prohibition of abortion in Texas allows a doctor to provide services of abortion when, in the good faith judgment of the physician and in consultation with the pregnant person, a pregnant person has a physical emergency”.
In this sense, doctors cannot be prosecuted for performing abortions, among others, before “a physical condition or a complication of the pregnancy that poses a risk of infection or that makes the continuation of the pregnancy unsafe for the pregnant woman or before ” a fetal condition that makes it unlikely that the fetus will survive the pregnancy and remain alive after birth.
This temporary ruling will stand until the lawsuit against Texas is completed, unless a higher court intervenes, although the injunction is expected to be appealed.
“Today’s ruling alleviates months of confusion about what conditions qualify as medical emergencies under Texas’ abortion bans, giving doctors permission to use their own medical judgment to determine when an abortion is needed,” said the Center’s president. of Reproductive Rights, the center’s President and CEO, Nancy Northup, in a statement.
The Centro Human Rights organization filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas last March on behalf of five women who were denied an abortion, despite the fact that state law allows it to be done in situations of medical emergencies, such as the case of these five women, as stated by the center at the time.
Northup believes that the current ruling “should prevent other Texans from suffering the unthinkable trauma their plaintiffs endured” and cast a possible appeal by Texas as “inconceivable.”
“The court has been clear: abortion is essential health care that saves lives,” the representative of the organization has sentenced.
The Texas Supreme Court ratified in March 2022 a law approved in September 2021 that prohibited the right to abortion even in situations of rape or incest, after various organizations and abortion clinics began a legal fight against the controversy. rule.
