This past week, Texas resident Kate Cox tried to terminate a nonviable pregnancy that would—according to her physician—imperil her ability to become pregnant in the future. Her physician, facing an interlocking set of incoherent state laws, asked a court to determine whether a good-faith exception to Texas’ abortion regulation would allow an abortion; a lower court granted that exception. Then, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took it upon himself to intervene, threatening both Cox’s physicians and the hospitals at which she had admitting privileges with criminal sanctions, including 99 years of jail time and loss of licensure, if anyone aided Cox in terminating a pregnancy that had already driven her to an emergency room four times, and that could not possibly result in a viable birth. The Texas Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision last week, held that while physicians and not judges should have the last word on exigent maternal health matters, in this instance the judges of Texas would have the last word on this matter, and that Cox’s physician’s good-faith belief that her patient needed to terminate her pregnancy was not quite good-faith enough for Texas.

Last summer, Amanda Zurawski and a number of plaintiffs sued to have Texas clarify its inscrutable and malleable “exception” rule, that, as it currently stands, does not seem to allow many exceptions at all, and instead threatens all abortion providers with losing their licenses, paying extortionate fines, and going to prison for 99 years if they help their clients access such care. That case went to the Texas Supreme Court on the same day Kate Cox learned that her baby would die of trisomy 18, the week before the Texas courts forced her to travel out of state to terminate her pregnancy.

On Amicus this week, Amanda Zurawski, the lead plaintiff in that ongoing Texas lawsuit, and one of her lawyers, Jamie Levitt, of Morrison and Foerster, who joined with the Center for Reproductive Rights to protect the rights of women in Texas, joined the show. Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

Dahlia Lithwick: Right before we jumped on to tape today’s show, I was reflecting to Jamie that during my own pregnancy loss, I couldn’t move or get out of bed or answer the phone. I was in so much pain and so sad and so terrified. And Jamie, it raises this question for me that you’ve been battling the state of Texas on, which is the standing question. This issue, which goes all the way to........

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