Texas Supreme Court abortion ruling: What's next?
TEXAS - In this FOX 7 Focus, the state Supreme Court issued a key ruling this week denying Texas woman Kate Cox's petition for an emergency abortion under the state's ban. So what impact could this decision have going forward?
FOX 7's John Krinjak spoke with Eddy Carter, constitutional law professor at Prairie View A&M, to find out more.
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JOHN KRINJAK: Bring us up to speed on this case so far. How did we get to this ruling that the state's high court handed down on Monday?
EDDY CARTER: Yes, this is a particularly difficult set of circumstances. Miss Cox was a 31-year-old mother. She had discovered that she was pregnant with another child and then, during the course of her pregnancy, discovered that there was a fetal anomaly, Trisomy 18, which is typically, virtually 100% of the times, the fetus does not survive post birth. And so she, as a result of that, the diagnosis, had requested to get an abortion in Austin. Judge granted her permission to move forward with the abortion. But the response of the AG's office was immediate. As a result of that, the case was referred to the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court came down on AG Paxton's side this past Monday. But then during the process of all of that, Ms. Cox decided to go outside of the state and to pursue abortion in another context.
JOHN KRINJAK: And so looking at the ruling itself, as far as what it actually said, what jumped out at you there?
EDDY CARTER: An interesting thing about this particular ruling was that the court indicated that Mrs. Cox did not meet the medical exception requirements of current Texas law on the issue of abortion. The court's ruling centered around a couple of phrases in the current state law. The interesting thing about the law is that it starts out that a patient must be experiencing. We see vividly demonstrated in this law that there's no regard for the condition of the fetus.
JOHN KRINJAK: Does this kind of reveal to you that, regardless of what the law is, that it needs to at least be worded more clearly?
EDDY CARTER: It demonstrates the reality that law suffers when it is excessively ambiguous. There's going to be a sense in which every law requires interpretation. But this law is especially ambiguous. It's especially muddy. There's been no effort on the part of the legislature or on the part of the AG at this point to provide greater clarity with regard to what this law means. And so, as long as that ambiguity is in place, there's going to be a tremendous amount of reticence on the part of medical professionals, doctors and medical teams and hospitals to provide what they deem to be mandatory, genuine, legitimate care. And this is a real problem.
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JOHN KRINJAK: Now, separate from this case, there's obviously a lot of other pending litigation around the abortion bans here in Texas. Do you see this case, this ruling, having any impact on those cases?
EDDY CARTER: I see this ruling as only having an impact in that it will be persuasive. It demonstrates the restrictive nature of the current state of abortion law in the state of Texas. I know that there's one case. I think it's Zabriskie that's currently before the Supreme Court. They have heard arguments regarding that particular case, and such can consist of a female who discovered that her fetus was and there was no heartbeat, and she requested an abortion. She has been denied an abortion thus far, and the court will not make a decision until the early part of next year, probably. But this debate is going to go on and on.