condition Texas is asking the Supreme Court to let it continue to deny emergency medical care to pregnant women. The request, which the justices will consider at a conference on Monday, Sept. 30, comes on the heels of a new report showing that the state’s maternal mortality rate has risen dramatically since its first abortion ban went into effect in 2021.
Across the United States, maternal mortality rose 11% between 2019 and 2022; in Texas, maternal mortality rose 56% during the same period, according to an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data by the Gender Policy Institute.
“There is only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality rates,” Nancy L. Cohen, president of the institute, told NBC News. “All the research points to 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 continuing their efforts to ensure the state can prevent doctors from providing emergency medical treatment to pregnant residents. The state has sued the Department of Health and Human Services, arguing that the Biden administration violated the Medicare Act and administrative procedures when it issued guidance clarifying that hospitals are required to provide emergency abortions if necessary to preserve a woman’s health — even in states that ban abortion, like Texas.
Texas won that argument in the Fifth Circuit Court earlier this year, allowing the state to continue banning emergency abortions. Now the Biden administration is appealing that decision, and Texas is asking the Supreme Court to let the Fifth Circuit’s ruling stand.
If all this sounds familiar, it's because a case on a very similar question came before the Supreme Court last session; the court dismissed that case – moyle vs united states But the issue is far from settled. The New York State Supreme Court ruled that doctors could not provide any treatment to pregnant women with health- and life-threatening conditions, or should these women be forced to become sick and in some cases die because a state law prohibits the very treatment they need?
At least one Texas woman may have already died because of Texas’s ban. Yennefer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, 27, died of pregnancy complications in 2022; four experts who examined her case told New Yorker She might have lived if she had been offered an abortion and accepted it, but she was never given the choice.
For its part, Texas denies that the case is about whether women in the state will be able to get abortion care. Instead, Attorney General Ken Paxton—with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative Christian law firm that helped engineer the abortion law’s destruction—has argued that the case is about whether women in the state will be able to get abortion care. Roe v. Wade – He insisted that he and his co-counsel were simply trying to ascertain whether Joe Biden's Department of Health and Human Services violated the law by issuing its clarification without the “proper notice and comment” period and/or without the proper “statutory authorization.”
Republican attorneys general like Paxton have increasingly begun outsourcing their culture war cases to the ADF, Rolling Stone The group previously reported that it helped draft Mississippi's abortion ban that the Supreme Court used to strike down. RoeHe was chosen by Idaho Attorney General Raul Labrador to defend the state's abortion ban in the Supreme Court in the previous emergency abortion case before the court this year.
Some background on the case: After the Supreme Court struck down the federal right to abortion in 2022, Idaho imposed a near-total ban on terminating pregnancies in the state. The ban included one exception: abortions could be provided to save a pregnant woman’s life. But the language presented doctors and nurses with a tough challenge—particularly when it came to treating conditions like ectopic pregnancy and premature rupture of the membranes, both of which can be fatal if left untreated—and they had to decide how sick a woman was before they could legally intervene.
Last year, a lower court partially blocked Idaho’s ban, allowing emergency abortions to be performed in hospitals if needed to protect the mother’s health. Shortly after, the Supreme Court stepped in to block the order, barring doctors from treating their patients and, in some cases, forcing them to fly those patients to a neighboring state for treatment. In June, a majority of the justices recognized that the court should not have intervened prematurely, dismissed the case and allowed doctors to begin providing emergency abortions in Idaho again.
Now, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar is asking the court to hear the Texas case, vacate the Fifth Circuit’s ruling, and send the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration in light of the court’s decision in Moel. Meanwhile, Ken Paxton and the ADF insisted to the judges: “This is not Moel 2.0“.”
The justices will consider both arguments at a news conference next week, and in the meantime, pregnant women in Texas are likely to continue to die at higher rates than their counterparts in states with more sensible sentencing.
