San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Readers overwhelmingly support Texas woman
Kate Cox’s request for a medically necessary abortion and the response from Attorney General Ken Paxton has captivated the nation, including Express-News readers.
This past week, we received more than a dozen letters regarding Cox’s case, Paxton’s opposition and the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a lower court’s ruling that had granted Cox an abortion.
Cox, 31, and a mother of two, learned that her fetus has trisomy 18, also known as Edwards syndrome, making the pregnancy nonviable. Doctors have said that carrying the pregnancy to term could create complications for Cox or threaten her ability to have children in the future.
Online, the nine published letters written in response to this case (Readers go off about Texas’ draconian abortion ban and Attorney General Ken Paxton is not a doctor) as well as a column from Editorial
Page Editor Josh Brodesky and a subsequent editorial received an overwhelming response.
This is an issue that crosses
many divides. The letters have come from men and women, medical professionals and those worried about what the recent decisions mean for the future of women’s health care.
They have come from conservatives and liberals.
The writers grapple with complexities that have followed the reversal of Roe v. Wade and Texas’ legislative stance that life begins at conception, preventing abortions with very few exceptions.
Reagin S. McAllister asks in a letter sent this week, “What am I missing here? The Texas Supreme Court decrees that ‘it falls to doctors, not judges, to make medically appropriate decisions,’ yet overturns the court order that would have made that possible.”
It’s clear that although Cox left Texas to have the medical procedure, this issue isn’t resolved. There is still Zurawski v. Texas, a case that involves 20 women with complicated pregnancies. Abortion can be a challenging conversation, but as the Cox case shows, it’s one that we need to continue in civil and thoughtful ways.
Send your letters, up to 150 words, on this or any other topic to letters@expressnews.net. Please include first and last name, mailing address and phone number. Only the first and last name would be published.