A court in Texas, USA on Friday (August 4) issued a temporary order to support group of women and doctor who brought a lawsuit to challenge the state’s abortion bans.
The ruling however, was stayed just hours later after Texas attorney general’s office filed an appeal. Judge Jessica Mangrum’s decision has been blocked until the lawsuit is decided on its merits in a trial slated to begin next March.
The case was filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights. It argued that the way medical exceptions are defined under Texas law is confusing. This, it said stoked fear among doctor and caused a “health crisis.
Mangrum wrote in her judgment that she agreed that the women were “delayed or denied access to abortion care because of the widespread uncertainty regarding physicians’ level of discretion under the medical exception to Texas’s abortion bans.”
Judge Mangrum ordered that doctors can’t be prosecuted for exercising their “good faith judgment.”
She said that doctors should be allowed to decide what they thought constituted medical emergencies which would risk a woman’s “life and/or health (including their fertility),” she said.
First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster said in a statement that the state filed an appeal that “stays an activist Austin judge’s attempt to override Texas abortion laws pending a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court.”
Last month, the court in Austin, Texas heard harrowing testimony from the plaintiffs last month.
Amanda Zurawski, after whom the case is named, said she was denied an abortion despite her water breaking very early in her pregnancy, meaning a miscarriage was inevitable.
She said that her doctor told her that she “couldn’t intervene, because the baby’s heart was still beating and inducing labor would have been considered an illegal abortion.”
Zurawski went into life-threatening septic shock and the fetus was stillborn.
This lawsuit is the first that was brought on behalf of women who were denied abortions since the Supreme Court in the US overturned a landmark judgment that previously guaranteed constitutional right to abortion.
In Texas, if a physician is found guilty of providing abortions, they may get handed up to 99-year prison sentence. In addition to this, a fine of up to USD 100,000 may be slapped and their medical license may be revoked.
A state “trigger” ban went into effect when Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, prohibiting abortions even in cases of rape or incest. Texas also has a law that allows private citizens to sue anyone who performs or aids an abortion.
(With inputs from agencies)
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