Women. If you care about being treated like an adult AND A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES where you have the same rights in every state, not just some, do not vote for Republicans. Period.
Even kook Justice Alito on the US Supreme Court has a wife who makes decisions.
Justice Alito has no problem telling American women they lack the right to make decisions about their own bodies and health. But apparently, he can’t tell his wife to take down a flag that calls the integrity of his decisions on the Supreme Court into question. He doesn’t care. He has life tenure and there are no binding ethics rules he must obey.
The Texas Supreme Court only has Republicans on it.
The Texas Supreme Court on Friday unanimously ruled against 22 women who suffered complications during pregnancy who had sued the state over its near-total abortion ban.
Why it matters: The state Supreme Court struck down a lower court’s ruling that clarified when abortion exceptions for medical emergencies should be allowed.
Context: The lawsuit, originally filed in March 2023, didn’t seek to overturn Texas’s ban but only to clarify when medical exceptions are allowed under the law.
- Critics have said the ambiguity over when exceptions are allow has contributed to confusion among doctors — who can be charged with a first-degree felony if they violate the law.
- They have also argued the confusion and possibility of criminal liability endangers the lives of pregnant women, who could denied necessary and potentially life-saving abortions.
How it works: Texas’s ban, one of the strictest in the country, does not include exceptions for rape or incest.
- Under it, physicians can perform an abortion only if the pregnant person’s life is at risk or if the pregnancy “poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” The provider must also attempt to save the fetus.
- A state district court judge ruled last summer that the state could not prosecute doctors who terminated a complicated pregnancy in their “good faith judgment,” but the order was almost immediately blocked through an appeal by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office.
What’s inside: The Texas Supreme Court, which is comprised only of elected Republicans, ruled Friday that the lower court’s ruling was flawed because “all pregnancies carry risks.”
- “While merely being pregnant may increase a mother’s risk of death or injury, pregnancy itself is not a ‘life-threatening physical condition’ under the law,” the court said.
Texas Rules Against Women.. Again
I’m not surprised, but I am sickened: The Texas Supreme Court has ruled against the twenty women who sued after the state’s abortion ban put their health and lives at risk. The justices decided that there’s no problem with the state’s ban, and that the issue was doctors misunderstanding the law—not the law itself. “Texas law permits a life-saving abortion,” the opinion states.
A refresher: The Center for Reproductive Rights brought the lawsuit on behalf of women harmed by Texas’ ban. You can read the details of their stories here, but it’s likely you remember some of their names: Amanda Zurawski, for example, ended up in the ICU with sepsis. She was denied care until she was on death’s door. Samantha Casiano—forced to give birth despite the fact that her baby was missing parts of her brain and skull—actually vomited on the stand while recounting watching her baby take pained last breaths. She said that talking about what happened “just makes my body remember and it just reacts.”
What was so hard about watching this case play out was seeing these women relive their worst moments just to have the state attorneys treat them like shit—including arguing that they didn’t have standing to even bring a suit because they weren’t currently pregnant. (Zurawski said, “I survived sepsis and I don’t think today was much less traumatic than that.”) The Court agreed with the state, ruling that the women didn’t have standing in the case. Which is…just mind-blowing.
Horrifically, justices also ruled that women should be forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term:
“The current law, however, plainly does not permit abortion based solely on a diagnosis that an unborn child has an abnormal condition, even a life-limiting one…
As painful as such circumstances are, that the law does not authorize abortions for diagnosed fetal conditions absent a life-threatening complication to the mother does not render it unconstitutional.”
Notice anything about the language there? “Life-limiting” is a term I’ve flagged before, one that anti-abortion activists want doctors and courts to use instead of calling a fetus’ condition lethal or nonviable. It looks like they got their wish. (It’s also worth noting that blaming doctors for not understanding the law is also an anti-abortion talking point, one we started to see soon after Roe was overturned.)
