December 8, 2023

District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble handed down a temporary restraining order of Texas’ draconian abortion law on Thursday. The order allows Kate Cox, of Dallas, to get an abortion and protects a Houston OB/GYN from civil and criminal penalties for performing it.

The Texas Tribune has the deets:

“The idea that Ms. Cox wants desperately to be a parent, and this law might actually cause her to lose that ability is shocking and would be a genuine miscarriage of justice,” Gamble said.

At 20 weeks pregnant, Cox learned her fetus had full trisomy 18, a chromosomal abnormality that is almost always fatal before birth or soon after. Before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Texas law allowed doctors to terminate pregnancies due to lethal fetal anomalies at any point during the pregnancy. But now, Cox’s doctors said their hands were tied by Texas’ abortion laws, which prohibit abortion except to save the life of the pregnant patient.

The Tribune noted that Cox burst into tears at the decision Although she and her husband had wanted the baby, her doctors said continuing the nonviable pregnancy risked both her health and future fertility.

Those “compassionate conservatives” in the Texas attorney general’s office opposed the ruling because it “does not meet all of the elements” to exempt a woman from the state’s abortion ban, presumably because Cox was not in any immediate danger of death – despite going to the ER four times in the previous month, according to The Tribune. Even though there is no direct appeal of a temporary restraining order, the state could “file a writ of mandamus petition, asking a higher court to take the extraordinary measure of overturning the emergency order.”

We know what the state's attorney general really cares about: that women such as Cox and others are mad as hell about the the state’s fascist intrusion into their bodies and they're not just taking it anymore.

UPDATE: Paxton is being Paxton.

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