Tweet Share Share Comment Here is a partial list of the not-medically-trained people who made the medical determination that terminating Kate Cox’s 20-plus-week-old pregnancy would not fall under an approved exception to Texas’ three overlapping abortion bans. Not one of these people, mind you, knows anything about pregnancy, medicine, or Kate Cox’s life, they each just decided that because she did not suffer from “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced,” she could not access an abortion, despite the fact that her fetus did receive, from a physician, a diagnosis incompatible with life. The list of people with the moral certainty and medical acumen to restrict this woman’s access to the health care that would in fact preserve her fertility are:
Ken Paxton, Texas’ nearly impeached attorney general, who appealed a lower court order granting Cox permission to terminate her pregnancy, which she had received following a diagnosis of trisomy 18, a genetic anomaly that virtually always results in miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death, and frequently causes severe physical pain for the mother and may impair her efforts to bear future children. Add to the list Paxton’s crack team of lawyers who argue—as ace physicians—that Cox should just have had her abortion in Florida if she wants one so badly, then threatened to prosecute her physician and any hospital which aided Cox in Texas despite the existence of a court order specifically shielding them from prosecution.
All nine justices of the Texas Supreme Court, who unanimously determined on Monday in a nine-page opinion that while “no one disputes that Ms. Cox’s pregnancy has been extremely complicated,” the problem was that when Ms. Cox’s physician expressed a “good faith belief” that her condition met the legal standard for an exception, this was not a sufficient quantum of legal certainty upon which to predicate a medical judgment. While noting in their opinion that “a pregnant woman does not need a court order to have a life-saving abortion in Texas,” the great minds of the court determined that Ms. Cox could not receive a life-saving abortion in Texas without a court order.
Among those nine eminent medical experts, one must single out Justice John Devine, a radical Christian fundamentalist who has bragged of being arrested 37 times for protesting at abortion clinics. His election campaign included a video depicting his wife’s decision to continue a high-risk pregnancy (her seventh), which was said to likely end in the deaths of both mother and child. The mother lived. The child lived for an hour.
Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs in such a way as to arrogate vast sums of medical authority to himself, his colleagues, eminent historical medical experts such as Sir Matthew Hale (M.D. ostensibly received from Witch Burner College sometime in the 17th century), and amicus brief spider monkey Robert George. While it’s true that Alito neither knew nor cared about women’s medical needs in his Dobbs opinion, it’s also true that without the Dobbs opinion, the Texas Supreme Court and Ken Paxton wouldn’t be telling Katie Cox that she is, in effect, an ambulatory coffin for the duration of her pregnancy, because government was getting itself out of the abortion-regulation business.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who concurred in the Alito opinion in Dobbs that cared not a whit about any actual living human pregnant person, but nonetheless Kavanaugh managed to congratulate himself on the depth of his feeling, empathy, and perception in making the decision: “Amidst extraordinary controversy and challenges, all of [the justices who have historically grappled with abortion rights] have addressed the abortion issue in good faith after careful deliberation, and based on their sincere understandings of the Constitution and of precedent. I have endeavored to do the same.” Oh, good. No doubt Kate Cox is deeply grateful for his good-faith grappling with her nonviable, dangerous pregnancy.
Donald J. Trump, who ran for the 2016 presidency on the promise that women who terminate their pregnancies should receive “some form of punishment,” until he reneged on that and clarified that only their physicians should be punished. It was, after all, his three Supreme Court nominees—none of whom know anything about maternal health, trisomy 18, fetal viability, or really anything medical at all—who came together to decide that the right to an abortion, enshrined for 50 years in the lives of all the people who had no such rights at the founding of our country, was no longer a right, because Matthew Hale and Spider Monkey George believe this to be science. As a result of this science, Kate Cox decided she had to flee her home state so she might terminate her nonviable pregnancy.
So here we are. It’s 2023 and Texas has elected an all-Republican Supreme Court that is now asserting in a written opinion that the judiciary shouldn’t be deciding reproductive rights questions because such questions should be left to medical experts, at the exact same time that it is second-guessing a real, live medical expert and granting to itself the sole power to decide which acute medical conditions are life-threatening and which are just jolly good fun. It’s 2023, and Ken Paxton is accusing the pregnant mother of two children, who desperately wants more children, of being untruthful with the courts, while he terrorizes her physician and the hospitals at which she has admitting privileges. What is “substantial impairment of a major bodily function” if not the impairment of future childbirth? The only way Kate Cox can persuade a bunch of elected judges and lawyers (who have never met her and don’t care about her health or her reproductive future) that she should be allowed to end an excruciating, doomed pregnancy is by either: 1) dying; or 2) having a physician certify that she will die without treatment. And this macabre pretzel is what we are advised is definitionally “pro-life.”
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Kate Cox is a woman who has already been to the emergency room four times “for pregnancy symptoms including severe cramps, leaking fluid and elevated vital signs.” She is a woman who is simply asking to be viewed as an adult human capable of making a medical decision with her physician. And in response, the people in power are decidedly saying to her that there is essentially no medical authority that they trust more than themselves to make that decision—oh, and their decision is always no, and if an actual doctor dares to contradict them, that doctor could be facing a 99-year prison sentence.
Who is responsible for this horrific turn of events? Those who opt to vote for politicians who so fetishize pregnancy and childbirth that they will let courts mandate that nonpregnancies and unsuccessful childbirth are materially more important than actual pregnant people and actual viable babies. And in the same breath, these people scream that they won’t let anyone tell their kids what books to read. They won’t let anyone tell them if they can purchase a gun. They have less than no patience for any entity that purports to regulate how they speak. But for some reason, they expect pregnant people to cede complete and unbounded authority to anyone with a legal opinion on maternal health care, because the last remaining class of people who are wholly imaginary in America is the pregnant ones.
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After Dobbs came down, the pro-life football-spikers assured us that they were in it for the moms, and the babies, with all the wholesome pro-lifey gooey humanity that comes with such status. And yet, after Kate Cox’s physician warned her, according to their court papers, that “the safest option to protect Ms. Cox’s health and future fertility was to get a D&E abortion,” the people invested in fulfilling that promise were nowhere to be found—and then they were quite suddenly everywhere to be found, asserting their right to still restrict choices proffered by actual medical authorities. That the majority that penned Dobbs and the Texas Supreme Court decided that they all knew better is conclusive proof that nobody cared enough about Kate Cox’s next pregnancy, or her desire for an actual viable baby.
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It is one thing for jurists to inhabit a world in which fake people with fake facts drive doctrine for the rest of us. It’s another matter entirely when actual people with real facts—real pain, real suffering, real bleeding, and real babies who will really die or suffer before they die—don’t matter enough to inspire judges to act with humanity. Dobbs was never about protecting mothers, or their babies. It was about control, and the abject awfulness of what the state of Texas has imposed on Kate Cox, her family, and her doctor makes that plain. It is about pretending to respect maternity and modesty and medicine while insulting all three, and calling it “law.”
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Tweet Share Share Comment Here is a partial list of the not-medically-trained people who made the medical determination that terminating Kate Cox’s 20-plus-week-old pregnancy would not fall under an approved exception to Texas’ three overlapping abortion bans. Not one of these people, mind you, knows anything about pregnancy, medicine, or Kate Cox’s life, they each just decided that because she did not suffer from “a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced,” she could not access an abortion, despite the fact that her fetus did receive, from a physician, a diagnosis incompatible with life. The list of people with the moral certainty and medical acumen to restrict this woman’s access to the health care that would in fact preserve her fertility are:
Ken Paxton, Texas’ nearly impeached attorney general, who appealed a lower court order granting Cox permission to terminate her pregnancy, which she had received following a diagnosis of trisomy 18, a genetic anomaly that virtually always results in miscarriage, stillbirth, or infant death, and frequently causes severe physical pain for the mother and may impair her efforts to bear future children. Add to the list Paxton’s crack team of lawyers who argue—as ace physicians—that Cox should just have had her abortion in Florida if she wants one so badly, then threatened to prosecute her physician and any hospital which aided Cox in Texas despite the existence of a court order specifically shielding them from prosecution.
All nine justices of the Texas Supreme Court, who unanimously determined on Monday in a nine-page opinion that while “no one disputes that Ms. Cox’s pregnancy has been extremely complicated,” the problem was that when Ms. Cox’s physician expressed a “good faith belief” that her condition met the legal standard for an exception, this was not a sufficient quantum of legal certainty upon which to predicate a medical judgment. While noting in their opinion that “a pregnant woman does not need a court order to have a life-saving abortion in Texas,” the great minds of the court determined that Ms. Cox could not receive a life-saving abortion in Texas without a court order.
Among those nine eminent medical experts, one must single out Justice John Devine, a........
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