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.
Photo: iStockphoto AbortionPolitics
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.”