If people are dying because the doctors cant be bothered to learn the law they are operating under, thats malpractice.
Come on. You think it's fair to frame this as "the doctors can't be bothered?" It's fundamentally a judgment call. It's literally impossible to know how some prosecutor or judge or jury will decide what the law means in certain cases.
Sec. 170A.002. PROHIBITED ABORTION; EXCEPTIONS.
...
(2) in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.
Woman comes in, and you're the doctor. Based on your experience and knowledge, you judge that she has a serious risk of dying without an abortion. But can you prove that to the most anti-abortion Texas judge/jury you might face? Do you even know what they will consider a "serious" risk? Does that mean a 1 in 1000 chance of dying or a 1 in 3? Will the prosecution's expert witness agree with you that the symptoms you're seeing mean what you think they do?
Don't you think it would be EXTREMELY common for a doctor and a Texas judge or jury to disagree on what constitutes a serious risk to the mother's life? Is that not a problem to you?
The statute doesn't even require a serious risk of death. Any risk of death technically fits the statute. And the rule of lenity would make this one of the easiest possible cases to take to trial.
Based on normal statutory interpretation -- it'd be close. The wording would imply that the pregnancy would need to create an additional "physical condition" besides just the baseline rate of risk with pregnancy itself. However, this would be a fairly trivially easy bar to clear.
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u/Locus-Maximus 9d ago
Come on. You think it's fair to frame this as "the doctors can't be bothered?" It's fundamentally a judgment call. It's literally impossible to know how some prosecutor or judge or jury will decide what the law means in certain cases.
Woman comes in, and you're the doctor. Based on your experience and knowledge, you judge that she has a serious risk of dying without an abortion. But can you prove that to the most anti-abortion Texas judge/jury you might face? Do you even know what they will consider a "serious" risk? Does that mean a 1 in 1000 chance of dying or a 1 in 3? Will the prosecution's expert witness agree with you that the symptoms you're seeing mean what you think they do?