San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
No one should have to leave state for a health issue
A crestfallen husband sits in a hospital waiting room after kissing his wife before she’s taken into an operating room. They’ve planned on having a large family and she’s now 20 weeks pregnant with their third child. But this baby, if she’s born alive, won’t live long enough to go home with them. She won’t see her siblings. She will live in her family as a loving but painful memory.
Thinking of the daughter he won’t see grow up, and the wife with whom he wishes to grow old, the father hears a commotion, looks up and sees Texas Attorney General of Texas Ken Paxton marching toward the operating room. He is ahead of the nine, black-robed justices of the Texas Supreme Court. They’re all holding legal documents and flanked by security who brush the husband aside.
His wife, on the operating table for an emergency abortion to save her life and fertility, is going under anesthesia when the intruders storm into the operating room, thrust their legal documents into the faces of medical personnel and order them to drop their instruments.
Already heartbroken that the child she’s carrying has a fatal disorder, the last thing she sees is the oafish smug of Paxton looking down upon her.
That’s the dramatization of what was done to Kate Cox and her husband, Justin. Cox is a household name thanks to the singular cruelty of Paxton and the state of Texas’ restrictions on abortion. We’re now familiar with the story of this Dallas mother of two, who, 20 weeks into her pregnancy, learned that her fetus has the genetic disorder Trisomy 18, which offers little if any chance of survival. Cox’ symptoms, including cramping, were so severe that during a two-week period she went to the emergency room multiple times.
With the consultation of her doctor, Cox, and her husband, made the painful conclusion that without an abortion, her life and fertility were threatened, which would seem to qualify as an exception allowed under Texas law that mostly bans abortion.
The Center for Reproductive Rights filed an emergency petition on behalf of Cox. After a district court judge approved the request, Paxton appealed it to the Texas Supreme Court and wrote a letter threatening the hospitals where Cox may have had the abortion.
After the Texas Supreme Court put a temporary hold on her possible abortion, but before it ruled against her, Cox left Texas to have the procedure.
In siding with Paxton, the Texas Supreme Court acknowledge that Cox has a very complicated pregnancy and “tragic diagnosis.” But then the justices say, “Some difficulties in pregnancy, however, even serious ones, do not pose the heightened risks to the mother the exception encompasses.”
A fatal genetic disorder that measures the newborn’s life in hours and days, threatens the life of the mother, and risks her fertility fails to rise to those heights? he state has failed to clarify what, specifically, are the exceptions in which abortions are allowed.
If the plight of Cox doesn’t rise to that level, then what does? The ethically challenged Paxton is at least honest, through his actions,
in showing he doesn’t care about the Cox family or easing their emotional anguish. Other Texas elected officials, including both U.S. Senators have lacked the courage to publicly back Paxton or advocate in support of Cox.
We shouldn’t be so familiar with the details of such an agonizing decision. It should only be known to family and doctors. Because male privilege is having an unregulated reproductive organ, there is no man in Cox’s or any other woman’s position who must seek the state’s permission for a medical procedure that
would save his life or protect his ability to reproduce.
In a guest commentary for the Dallas Morning News, Cox wrote, “I need to end my pregnancy now so that I have the best chance for my health, for parenting my children, and for a future pregnancy.”
For those needs, she shouldn’t have had to go public. She shouldn’t have had to beg. She shouldn’t have had to flee her home state.
Nor should any other woman.