Texas asks Supreme Court to continue denying care to pregnant women

The state of Texas is asking the Supreme Court to please allow it to continue denying emergency medical care to pregnant women. The request, which the justices will consider at a conference on Monday, September 30, follows a new report that shows the state’s maternal mortality rate has increased dramatically since the first ban took effect of abortion in the state in 2021.

In the United States, maternal mortality increased by 11 percent between 2019 and 2022; In Texas, during the same period, the maternal mortality rate jumped 56 percent, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data conducted by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

“There is only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality,” Nancy L. Cohen, president of the institute, told NBC News. “All research points to the Texas abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.”

Five weeks before an election that could hinge on outrage over abortion restrictions, Texas officials are nevertheless continuing their efforts to ensure the state can continue to prevent doctors from providing emergency medical care to pregnant residents. The state sued the Department of Health and Human Services, arguing that the Biden administration violated Medicare laws and administrative procedures when it issued guidance clarifying that hospitals are required to practice emergency abortions if necessary to preserve a woman’s health – even in states that, like Texas, ban abortion.

Texas won with that argument at the Fifth Circuit earlier this year, allowing the state to continue banning emergency abortions. The Biden administration is now appealing that decision, and Texas is asking the high court to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s decision.

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because a case that revolved around a very similar issue came before the Supreme Court last session; the court dismissed this case — Moyle v. United States — without commenting on the merits. The fundamental question at the heart of both cases is the same: Should doctors be allowed to treat pregnant women whose health and lives are in danger, or should these women be forced to become ill and, in some cases , to die because of a pathological condition? a law prohibiting the specific treatment they need?

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At least one Texas woman may have already died because of Texas’ ban. Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, 27, died of pregnancy complications in 2022; four experts who examined his case told the New Yorkers she would probably have survived if she had been offered and accepted an abortion. We never gave him a choice.

Texas, for its part, denies that this case is about whether or not women in the state will be able to access abortion care. Instead, Attorney General Ken Paxton – assisted by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian law firm that helped organize the destruction of Roe v. Wade — insists that he and his co-counsel are simply trying to determine whether Joe Biden’s HHS violated the law by issuing its clarification without the “proper notice and comment” period and/or without proper “statutory authorization.”

Republican attorneys general like Paxton have increasingly begun outsourcing their culture war litigation to the ADF, as rolling stone has already reported. The group, which claims to have helped write Mississippi’s abortion ban, which the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe deerwas tapped by Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador to defend that state’s abortion ban before the Supreme Court in a previous case involving emergency abortions before the court this year .

Some background on this case: After the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion in 2022, Idaho imposed a near-total ban on terminations of pregnancies in the state. The ban included one exception: abortions could be performed to save the life of a pregnant person. But this language posed a difficult challenge for doctors and nurses – particularly when it came to treating conditions such as ectopic pregnancies and PPROM (premature rupture of the membrane), both of which can be fatal if left untreated – and they had to decide how sick a patient was. the woman had to have been so before she could legally intervene.

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Last year, a lower court suspended, in part, enforcement of Idaho’s ban, allowing emergency abortions in hospitals if necessary to protect the mother’s health. Shortly afterward, the Supreme Court stepped in to block the move, preventing doctors from treating their patients, in some cases forcing them to fly those patients to a neighboring state for treatment. In June, a majority of justices agreed that the court should not have prematurely gotten involved in the case, dismissing the case and allowing doctors to resume performing emergency abortions in Idaho.

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Today, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is asking the court to hear the Texas case, reverse the Fifth Circuit’s decision, and send the case back to lower courts for reconsideration in light of the court decision in Moyle. Ken Paxton and ADF insisted to the judges: “It is not Moyle2.0.”

The justices will consider both arguments at a conference next week, and in the meantime, pregnant women in Texas will likely continue to die at higher rates than their counterparts in states with reasonable governance.