Texas’s ‘Life of the Mother Act’ Would Still Force Women to Carry Nonviable Pregnancies

“They were never going to stop at making care inaccessible," one Texas OBGYN said of the state's anti-abortion lawmakers.

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Texas’s ‘Life of the Mother Act’ Would Still Force Women to Carry Nonviable Pregnancies

In this increasingly unpredictable time for American politics, we can be certain of a few things: death, taxes, and anti-abortion lawmakers—especially in Texas—flaunting meaningless exceptions to their abortion bans that don’t have any real function beyond being crisis PR for Republicans. (As the Center for Reproductive Rights attorney Linda Goldstein once put it to Jezebel, exceptions only serve as “window dressing to make abortion bans look reasonable” while being “too vague and too difficult for doctors to be able to apply to save someone’s life.”)

This week, the Texas legislature held hearings for the so-called “Life of the Mother Act” (HB 44 and SB 31), which claims to “clarify” when health providers are permitted to perform emergency abortions under the state’s total ban. The ban currently only allows abortion when someone’s life is at risk, or they’re at risk of serious bodily impairment—without specifying what any of that entails. HB44/SB31 slightly updates language from the current ban, striking out the words “life-threatening” in one sentence but keeping “places the female at risk of death.” So… there’s no real change! Doctors who violate the abortion ban could still face life in prison and a $100,000 fine on top of termination of their medical license.

The Life of the Mother Act would crucially exclude Texas women like Taylor Edwards, who was denied an emergency abortion in Texas for her nonviable, dangerous pregnancy, because she wasn’t imminently at risk of death—even though being forced to carry a nonviable pregnancy still comes with grave risks to someone’s long-term health, on top of being incredibly traumatic. At the hearing this week, Edwards recounted her story and chastised “our so-called representatives” who “instead prefer to force these women to carry to term a baby who would never survive outside the womb, and allow a mother and child to suffer agonies of a life that’s not meant to be lived for the sake of their own comfort.” Another Texas woman named Kaitlyn Kash recounted to the Tribune that she was denied an emergency abortion in 2021 despite a horrific fetal condition, all but guaranteeing that “the baby would suffocate after being born.”

As one advocate put it, speaking before the U.S. Senate in 2024, “Why would anyone want to deliberately create a world where women are forced to be walking coffins?”

It also speaks volumes that this bill was written by Texas Right to Life, the leading anti-abortion organization in the state that’s currently recruiting men to take legal action against ex-partners who have had abortions. After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, the organization’s president, John Seago, pledged to make the organization’s agenda even more extreme. Speaking of effectively transforming pregnant people’s bodies into coffins: Seago told the Tribune that pregnant people with nonviable pregnancies should be offered perinatal palliative care. That means, instead of being able to safely end a pregnancy that won’t end in a live birth, or will end in a newborn baby dying within hours, these women should receive grief counseling and other emotional support. Patients should certainly have the option of perinatal palliative care if they seek it. But even more important, they should have the ability to end a dangerous, traumatizing, nonviable pregnancy. 

Nonetheless, the Life of the Mother Act holds strong bipartisan support. Democratic lawmakers agree that the bill should include language allowing patients to terminate nonviable but not immediately life-threatening pregnancies, but they say this isn’t possible in the GOP legislature: “I bet people in hell want cold water,” state Rep. Jolanda Jones (D) crudely told the Tribune. “But they don’t have it.” Similarly, Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair Gene Wu said last month, “We will not trade the lives of Texas women and infants for righteous political posturing.”

But as abortion funds, doctors, and other advocates have stressed, this bill isn’t merely breadcrumbs—it’s actively harmful. Texas Right to Life has referred to the bill as a moderated revival of a 1925 abortion ban, which makes it a criminal offense for anyone to not just perform an abortion but even to “furnish the means” for one—aka, help someone access abortion. The 1925 law is blocked from being enforced right now, but advocates warn the Life of the Mother Act is effectively a backdoor to re-enforcing it.

“The Texas legislature is reviving a century old and out of use criminal abortion ban to target, surveil, and criminalize people who have been living through the harmful ripple effect of their cruelly designed abortion bans for years. What is unique is that this bill is that it is being presented as a fix to our current abortion access crisis, but it will actually only instead cause more harm,” Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health and a Texas OBGYN, said in a statement about the Life of the Mother Act.

Pregnancy is already far too dangerous in Texas, where the state’s stringent abortion ban has yielded soaring sepsis rates and even caused several documented maternal deaths. According to a study from Moayedi and other researchers, Texas hospitals “overinterpret” abortion bans and take an extremely conservative approach, beyond what’s required of them, fearing criminal charges and costly lawsuits. Edwards is one of over a dozen women who almost died or faced severe health complications from being denied emergency abortions for unsafe and nonviable pregnancies and sued Texas in 2023, asking the court to specify under what circumstances doctors can legally provide emergency abortions. The Texas Supreme Court dismissed the case in May 2024. All efforts to clarify this incredibly nebulous exception have failed. 

“I am enraged that Texas is trying to further attack our community,” Moayedi said. “They were never going to stop at making care inaccessible. They will work tirelessly to ensure that people are living under a fear-based regime to scare people out of making the decisions they know are right for their bodies, families, and futures.”

 
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