The Texas Supreme Court on Friday rejected a challenge to the state’s strict abortion ban — a response to a lawsuit filed last year by a group of women who had serious pregnancy complications.
The decision was unanimous. All nine justices are Republicans.
Five The women filed the lawsuit in March 2023, saying they were denied abortions even when problems arose during the pregnancy that put their lives at risk. The case grew to include 20 women and two doctors.
The plaintiffs did not seek to repeal the ban, but rather to force clarification and transparency regarding the precise circumstances in which exceptions are permitted. They also wanted doctors to have more freedom to intervene when medical complications arise during pregnancy.
In August, a district judge issued a preliminary injunction, blocking Texas from enforcing the ban against doctors terminating a pregnancy they deemed unsafe due to complications.
“The Court finds that there is uncertainty about whether the medical exception to Texas’ abortion bans…allows a physician to provide abortion care when, in the physician’s good faith judgment and in consultation with the pregnant person, a pregnant person has an emergency medical problem, physical illness,” the decision said.
Zurawski v. Texas was the first legal challenge to the state’s bans that focused specifically on women with complicated pregnancies.
One of the lead plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, said she nearly died in August 2022 when doctors delayed performing a medically necessary abortion after she had catastrophic complications during her 18-week pregnancy. After her health declined, her doctors finally performed an abortion. She said she later developed sepsis and spent three days in the intensive care unit.
Her doctors later advised her not to try to get pregnant again, she said. So she and her husband turned to in vitro fertilization and sought to have a child through surrogacy.
Zurawski and some of the other plaintiffs testified about their experiences in July.
At that hearing, plaintiff Samantha Casiano said that at 20 weeks of pregnancy, she learned that her baby had anencephaly, a serious illness that meant the baby was missing parts of the brain and skull. The condition also put her life at risk, she said. Casiano sobbed and vomited on the stand as he described his baby’s fatal birth defect, prompting the judge to declare a recess. She said she suffered emotional trauma during her pregnancy.
The Texas Supreme Court’s ruling Friday is in line with a ruling issued in December ordering a lower court to vacate an order that had blocked enforcement of the state’s abortion ban in Kate Cox’s case.
Cox sued the state after her developing fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 18, a rare chromosomal disorder that significantly increases the risk of stillbirth or infant death shortly after birth. She sought a court order allowing her to terminate the pregnancy.
Cox’s lawyers argued that becoming pregnant put her health and future ability to have children at risk. Shortly before the Texas Supreme Court ruled against her, Cox left Texas to begin the proceedings. Her case is believed to be the first in which a person sought a court-ordered exception to the abortion ban following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Wade in 2022.
Texas law prohibits all abortions except to save the life of the pregnant patient. Doctors who violate it can lose their medical licenses, face up to 99 years in prison or face fines of at least $100,000. Critics of the ban, which is among the most restrictive in the US, said it does not provide enough clarity about permitted exceptions.
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