(Austin) The Texas Supreme Court on Tuesday debated whether courts in the conservative southern US state should clarify “medical exceptions” to the state’s abortion ban, as a women’s organization and doctors have called for. .
Since the Federal Supreme Court in June 2022 gave states the freedom to legislate on abortion, reversing jurisprudence of nearly half a century, around twenty of them have banned abortion or have very strongly restricted.
Texas prohibits any voluntary termination of pregnancy (abortion), including in cases of incest or rape. The only exceptions: in the event of danger of death or risk of serious disability for the mother. Doctors face up to 99 years in prison, a $100,000 fine and the revocation of their medical license if they perform an abortion outside this framework.
In a decision rendered in August, a trial judge recognized that the plaintiffs, now around twenty, had been “delayed or deprived of access to abortion due to widespread uncertainty regarding doctors’ room to maneuver.” .
It ordered that practitioners cannot be prosecuted after having exercised their “good faith judgment” and that they be authorized to determine what constitutes a medical emergency likely to endanger “life and/or health ( including fertility) of a woman.
“Terrified doctors”
“The trial court exceeded its constitutional prerogatives by rewriting and extending the medical emergency conditions” provided for by law, accused Tuesday before the Supreme Court of Texas Beth Klusmann, a representative of the office of the attorney of this state, who appealed.
The decision, immediately suspended due to this appeal, “effectively removes this criterion, so that there will never be a circumstance in which a woman cannot obtain an abortion,” she told the judges. , all Republicans.
“What gives rise to this need for clarification is that, as you yourself acknowledge, some of these women should have been allowed to have an abortion but their doctor told them ‘no, it’s not clear to me’” , objected one of the judges, Jeff Boyd.
In this case, the plaintiffs can turn against their doctor and sue him, argued the representative of the Attorney General, without seeming to convince the majority of the Court.
“The problem is that doctors are terrified of invoking these exceptions” and thus exposing themselves to prosecution by Texas authorities, argued Molly Duane, the lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Right (Center for Reproductive Rights), which initiated this legal action.
PHOTO SUZANNE CORDEIRO, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Molly Duane
“While there is technically a medical exception to the ban, no one knows what that means. And the State refuses to tell us,” she lamented.
“Not sick enough”
Like several of his colleagues, Judge Brett Busby expressed reservations about the trial decision. “Our job is to judge, not to develop laws to make them easier to understand and apply,” he said.
One of the plaintiffs, Jessica Bernardo, 39, said she had to have an abortion on the other side of the country, in Washington state (northwest), after discovering not only that her baby was not viable but that continuing her pregnancy put her own life in danger.
“My doctor was very attentive,” she emphasized. “She tried to plead my case to the hospital administration, but they refused because I was not sick enough. That’s why we had to make last minute arrangements,” she added, acknowledging that “not everyone is this lucky.”
No date is known for the decision of the Supreme Court of Texas which could rule on the merits or only on the stay of the first instance decision.
The case is scheduled to go to trial in March 2024.