UPDATE, MONDAY 12/11/23: According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which represents Kate Cox in her suit against the State of Texas, Cox “has been forced to leave Texas to get healthcare outside of the state.”
UPDATE, SATURDAY 12/9/23: More ghoulish fuckery from Ken Paxton, who has asked the nine Republican justices of the Texas Supreme Court to halt Kate Cox’s abortion. The TRO granting Cox permission for care is on hold indefinitely while the judges decide whether she lives or dies for getting pregnant.
Original story below.
Thursday, a Travis County judge issued a temporary restraining order allowing a Texas woman carrying an unviable pregnancy to access a medically necessary abortion. From the Texas Tribune:
For the first time in at least 50 years, a judge has intervened to allow an adult woman to terminate her pregnancy. When Travis County District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble handed down the temporary restraining order Thursday, Kate Cox, 31, of Dallas burst into tears. Cox and her husband desperately wanted to have this baby, but her doctors said continuing the nonviable pregnancy posed a risk to her health and future fertility, according to a historic lawsuit filed Tuesday.
Hours later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed to block that order, issuing a threat of first-degree felony prosecution against — his words — “hospitals, doctors, or anyone else” who complies with the court order to provide care to Kate Cox, a mother of two children whose fetus has been diagnosed with the fatal chromosomal abnormality trisomy 18. Ending this pregnancy is absolutely key to maintaining Cox’s health today, and her fertility in the future. But Ken Paxton? Made sure to remind us all that medical professionals targeted under Texas’s abortion bans stand to face $100,000 in fines, life in prison, and the loss of their medical licenses. Civil penalties of at least $10,000 could be levied against people accused of supporting or facilitating her (or anyone else’s) abortion care.
One of the reasons I don’t write as much commentary on abortion as I once did is that there are only so many times a person can explain this , and engage with all the reasons it’s fucked up, before you really feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall in an eight-sided chamber made entirely of brick walls. But I’ll be goddamned if Ken Paxton is going to get away with this ghoulish fuckery without me saying something.
This is the public statement Paxton issued at 1:45 this afternoon:
The Temporary Restraining Order (“TRO”) granted by the Travis County district judge purporting to allow an abortion to proceed will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws. This includes first degree felony prosecutions, Tex. Health & Safety Code § 170A.004, and civil penalties of not less than $100,000 for each violation, Tex. Health & Safety Code §§ 170A.005, 171.207-211. And, while the TRO purports to temporarily enjoin actions brought by the OAG and TMB against Dr. Karsan and her staff, it does not enjoin actions brought by private citizens. Tex. Health & Safety Code § ¬¬171.207. Nor does it prohibit a district or county attorney from enforcing Texas’ pre-Roe abortion laws against Dr. Karsan or anyone else. The TRO will expire long before the statute of limitations for violating Texas’ abortion laws expires.
We got a preview of Paxton’s intent to prosecute medical professionals and supporters of abortion care last week during a hearing before the Texas Supreme Court in another case involving over 20 women who are suing the state after being denied care involving their complicated, and often life-threatening, pregnancies. At that hearing, Texas Assistant Solicitor General Beth Klusman — cowardly Paxton loves to trot out a lady lawyer to take his hits for him — called life-threatening pregnancies “hard calls,” and asserted that dying women could take a break from dying and get a court order to terminate their pregnancies if they’re just that worked up about it.
From my report last week for MSNBC:
I can’t imagine the gall it took for Klusman to stand up in front of dozens of Texas women who nearly lost their lives — including some who have likely lost their ability to bear children in the future — and describe their near-death ordeals as “hard calls.” But that’s just what she did, saying that “if a woman is bleeding” or “has amniotic fluid running down her legs,” and doctors are not sure whether providing a life-saving abortion will land them in prison for life, “then the problem is not with the law. It is with the doctors.” In fact, Klusman argued, Texas women don’t even have standing to sue the state at all unless they are actively experiencing a pregnancy in crisis, right that second.
Well, Kate Cox did what the State of Texas said she ought to do: go to court in the middle of a medical crisis in the hopes that a judge would allow her to stay alive to raise her existing children, and maybe even to have more children in the future.
And the State of Texas is now threatening her doctor with life in prison. For (potentially!) respecting the very kind of court order it said would be necessary to comply with Texas’s abortion bans. (Internet lawyers are already supposing that Paxton’s threat letter violates the TRO, as it could constitute “enforcement” of the Texas abortion bans.)
I want to highlight a particularly rich line from Paxton’s odious, self-aggrandizing letter of threat: “A TRO is no substitute for medical judgment.”
I am not a lawyer, but I know the lay definition of entrapment well enough: compelling someone to commit an illegal act with the aim of securing their prosecution. I struggle to find a better descriptor for what the State of Texas is doing to medical professionals and abortion supporters. It’s clear that Ken Paxton is absolutely frothing to get himself a prosecution under Texas’s abortion bans. There’s nothing sly or scheming about the state’s approach; there’s no reading between the lines, here. The State of Texas is patently taunting doctors and hospitals to just go ahead and give it a try and see what happens.
This, of course, puts pregnant Texans in the worst kind of limbo: between a state apparatus that will jump at the first opportunity to prosecute providers, and their own doctors and hospitals — already highly risk-averse entities, even and especially in the face of deadly and cruel laws that demand medical professionals disavow their own oaths to provide the highest and best standard of care.
There is no call for this other than: the State of Texas is demanding that we give birth or die trying.
The morally depraved scumbags over at Texas Alliance for Life have, of course, weighed in, making the wholly unsupported claim from farther-than-afar that Kate Cox’s pregnancy doesn’t threaten her life, and adding that because their own “policy analyst” chose not to terminate a fetus with trisomy 18 (a decision she absolutely should have been empowered to make!), Cox shouldn’t be able to, either.
The depths of this cruelty. The depths. The depths.
Everyone deserves the agency, ability, and support necessary to end a pregnancy — not only because their lives or the lives of their fetuses are threatened, but because exercising our reproductive autonomy is at the very core of human dignity and freedom. To stand in the way of that ability is the absolute height of depravity, and Ken Paxton is right there.
Hell is not hot enough for Ken Paxton.
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