At first glance, today’s two biggest Texas news stories are perhaps not meaningfully related. But stick with me here.

There’s the Ken Paxton news: The Texas Attorney General has finally reached a deal to have his felony fraud charges dropped and his impending trial canceled in exchange for what is not so much a slap on the wrist as a kiss on the hand. (He will have to take some continuing education classes to help him not do crimes again.) This brings to a very tidy-for-Ken end to his nine-year legal journey that began with an indictment shortly after he took office in 2015.

And there’s the abortion news: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Food & Drug Administration vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case that kicked off back in Fall 2022 with a thoroughly venue-shopped petition tailored to the anti-abortion beliefs of Trump appointee Judge Matt Kacsmaryk in Amarillo. (I live-blogged the arguments on Bluesky.) AHM, an anti-abortion lobby group only nominally representing anti-abortion doctors, originally hoped to sue to entirely rescind FDA approval for the abortion medication mifepristone. Today’s hearing at SCOTUS was ostensibly supposed to deal only with some newer changes to the FDA-approved regimen for mife, but of course, arguments ended up ranging beyond that.

The Alliance Defending Freedom, the hyper-right wing Christian group behind abortion support travel bans and a host of novel anti-abortion legal thinking, is representing AHM. Their lawyer in court today was Erin Hawley — yes, that kind of Hawley — who was overmatched in practically every way, even when she was being lobbed softballs by her anti-abortion fellows, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito.

But Hawley did not come to talk about the FDA’s updates to the mifepristone REMS in 2016 and 2021. She came to bemoan the horrible plight of the doctors (I use the term loosely; one of the AHM’s complainants is a dentist) who say they are injured if, anywhere, a person might present at the ER after a medication abortion and need care … not just from themselves, personally, but per their petitions, even from their colleagues.

Here’s a recap from States Newsroom:

“These are emergency situations,” Hawley said. “Respondent doctors don’t necessarily know until they scrub into that operating room whether this may or may not be abortion drug harm — it could be a miscarriage, it could be an ectopic pregnancy, or it could be an elective abortion.”

Doctors, Hawley said, “can’t waste precious moments” in those circumstances.

To make it plain: Hawley’s saying that anti-abortion doctors “can’t wait precious moments” logging a conscientious objection to treating people who may have had an abortion, or else finding another doctor to take the case.

Hawley’s saying that anti-abortion doctors may — horror of horrors — be presented with the repugnant possibility of providing treatment to ER patients who have had, or tried to have, an abortion.

That anti-abortion doctors — “pro-life,” they call themselves — may not be able to exercise their right to let their patients lose their lives or their fertility to preserve their doctors’ sense of moral purity.

That anti-abortion doctors may not be able to simply let God punish the sluts.

Meanwhile, Texas’ criminally indicted attorney general will have to take, as his punishment for committing felony fraud, a couple of continuing education classes.

Ken Paxton will have to take a class for committing a felony.

And people who need emergency care to manage the end of a pregnancy will have to watch as their “pro-life” doctor flees the ward lest they taint their delicate soul.

I keep using the word “ghoulish” to describe the anti-abortion politics of folks like Ken Paxton — who is happy to let pregnant women die — and Hawley and the Alliance Defending Freedom, because it is the best way to describe the depths of their foulness.

Lying is also, if you ask me, pretty morally repugnant. But that’s what Hawley did today in front of the Supreme Court.

Because let’s be clear: medication abortion using mifepristone is an extremely safe and effective means of ending pregnancy.

The nightmare scenarios that Hawley would have the Court believe may play out at any and every moment in ERs across the country are vanishingly unlikely to happen. The anti-abortion lobbyists behind FDA v. AHM know this; they know their case is built on bullshit.

And I know they know their case is built on bullshit. Why? Because they are not opposed to mifepristone, or medication abortion in general, because it is potentially dangerous to pregnant people. They are angry because it isn’t. They are angry because medication abortion is becoming increasingly accessible in the post-Roe landscape. They are angry because medication abortion — especially via telehealth — allows pregnant people to continue to have a modicum of control over their bodies in the face of Republican politicians and right-wing state governments that would like to force them to remain pregnant against their will.

Because abortion bans are about control. They are about punishing people for non-compliance with misogynist, patriarchal demands that pregnant people give birth, go to jail, or die trying. If that means abandoning patients in the ER while they are scared and seeking care in order to teach them a lesson, so be it.

But Ken Paxton will have to take a class.

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