Texas abortion law endangers our daughters
This Mother’s Day marks almost eight years since I experienced the second of my two intense miscarriages, each of which resulted in hospitalization. I was blessed that the laws in Texas — and in the U.S. — were not what they are now, and I was able to get the stabilizing care I needed. That would likely not be the case today.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan signed the Emergency Medical Treatment & Labor Act (EMTALA), ensuring everyone the right to receive stabilizing care in an emergency room, regardless of ability to pay. New state abortion bans threaten to dismantle this right and restrict physicians’ ability to administer lifesaving treatments.
We are already enduring the impact of conflicting laws. Media reports have detailed numerous cases in which women’s lives were threatened after hospitals turned them away, refusing to offer stabilizing care. In Harris County, one woman recently miscarried in the lobby bathroom of an emergency room because she was denied treatment.
This is the current reality for my three young daughters, who are growing up with fewer rights than their grandmothers. As a mother, Latina and Catholic, I am sickened to see equality eroded and freedoms stripped away from my daughters and all young women. As a lawyer and a former judge, I am appalled to witness the legal system weaponized against women rather than protecting their fundamental rights.
When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it turned back half a century of progress and told our daughters that legislators in their states would have the last word on their bodies. When the Texas Legislature passed a draconian trigger law banning abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest, they told our daughters that their rights were less important than those of a criminal. And when the state of Texas sued the Biden administration claiming that EMTALA does not guarantee your right to an abortion — even in cases of medical emergencies — it told our daughters that the guarantee of stabilizing care for every American does not apply to them.
In this extreme climate, the message to our daughters is clear: Your survival isn’t a priority.
In a related case, the Supreme
Court will soon decide whether to upend decades of practice under EMTALA in favor of Idaho’s near-total abortion ban, which would likely affect Texas’ case. Idaho and Texas both argue that a doctor should be permitted to perform an abortion only if the doctor determines the patient would die without it. Supreme Court justices, particularly the women, ran through both hypothetical and real-life examples of
major but less-than-lethal threats — “merely a serious medical condition” in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s words — such as loss of an organ or the ability to have children. Idaho’s synthesized response: The seriousness of a medical condition is subjective; the care should not be a guaranteed right until a woman is near death.
If the Supreme Court rules in Idaho’s favor, pregnant women in Idaho, Texas and many other states will not receive stabilizing care. Instead, doctors would be
forced to let a woman’s health deteriorate until they’re confident that without it, she would die.
Even as extremist politicians work to undermine Americans’ fundamental rights, my message to our daughters is this: Leaders in Harris County will fight to protect your access to reproductive care.
Thanks to the Biden-Harris administration’s direct allocation of federal American Rescue Plan Act funding, my colleagues and I on the Harris County Commissioners Court formed a $6 million Reproductive Healthcare Access
Fund. Within the bounds of Texas’ laws, Harris County — the nation’s third largest county — is investing in local organizations to provide essential reproductive health care services, including access to comprehensive family planning services, screenings for sexually transmitted diseases and more.
Harris County is strengthening women’s ability to control their reproductive futures. Whether through education, family planning or health screenings, we are delivering a message steeped in the very
principles of EMTALA: You deserve access to care. So while extremists seek to score political points out of touch with the majority of Americans, we are taking action to support families.
Harris County is resisting. And this Texas mother will keep fighting like hell to build the Texas our daughters deserve.