By now, many Times readers have heard the story of Kate Cox, the Texas woman who received devastating news about her pregnancy in her second trimester and needed an abortion to preserve her health and her ability to have children in the future. She sued the state to try to get an abortion there. With the clock ticking — pregnancy is, after all, an exquisitely time-sensitive condition — she had to leave Texas to get the abortion she needed.
We know about Cox's story because she chose to go public about her predicament, but as Greer Donley, a law professor and reproductive rights expert, writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion, she is far from alone. Since Roe v. Wade's reversal last year, a growing number of women around the country have faced similar circumstances and have had to make similar heart-wrenching decisions.
The experience of discovering a severe fetal anomaly in the midst of a much-wanted pregnancy would be shattering to a family, no matter what the law said. But many of the anti-abortion laws on the books today have made things so much harder. Some such laws include exceptions for fetal anomalies or other circumstances that are worded so vaguely that, in practice, it is extremely difficult to get an abortion even when things are dire. (Texas' law does not include an exception for fetal anomalies.)
This is an impossible situation not just for patients and their loved ones but also for doctors, who are understandably terrified of misinterpreting a law that, if violated, could result in the loss of their medical licenses or a hefty fine or prison sentence.
As Donley writes in her essay, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe "greenlit a patchwork of abortion bans that are inherently standardless and functionally unworkable, forcing judges with no medical background into the business of making medical judgments."
Without a major change, we're likely to hear more stories like Cox's in the future. Because cases like hers were all but inevitable when these laws went into effect, written as they were.
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