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.
