“Do Something!”

If what Selzer is capturing in IA is revulsion on the part of senior women, including conservative ones, at an extreme abortion ban...it could lead one to wonder about TX, which has a similar ban, with much publicized severe consequences, and which was closer than IA in 2020.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) November 3, 2024

Mmmm, could be.

Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023. 

Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before. 

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave. 

Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care. 

By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing. 

Hours later, she was dead.

Feature, not bug:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully made his state the only one in the country that isn’t required to follow the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure that emergency departments don’t turn away patients like Crain. 

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the administration issued guidance on how states with bans should follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The federal law requires hospitals that receive funding through Medicare — which is virtually all of them — to stabilize or transfer anyone who arrives in their emergency rooms. That goes for pregnant patients, the guidance argues, even if that means violating state law and providing an abortion. 

Paxton responded by filing a lawsuit in 2022, saying the federal guidance “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes,” and was an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.” 

Part of the battle has centered on who is eligible for abortion. The federal EMTALA guidelines apply when the health of the pregnant patient is in “serious jeopardy.” That’s a wider range of circumstances than the Texas abortion restriction, which only makes exceptions for a “risk of death” or “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” 

The lawsuit worked its way through three layers of federal courts, and each time it was met by judges nominated by former President Donald Trump, whose court appointments were pivotal to overturning Roe v. Wade. 

After U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, quickly sided with Texas, Paxton celebrated the triumph over “left-wing bureaucrats in Washington.” 

“The decision last night proves what we knew all along,” Paxton added. “The law is on our side.” 

This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the order in a ruling authored by Kurt D. Engelhardt, another judge nominated by Trump. 

The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it clear that some emergency abortions are allowed. 

Even amid news of preventable deaths related to abortion bans, the Supreme Court declined to do so last month. 

Paxton called this “a major victory” for the state’s abortion ban. 

He has also made clear that he will bring charges against physicians for performing abortions if he decides that the cases don’t fall within Texas’ narrow medical exceptions. 

Last year, he sent a letter threatening to prosecute a doctor who had received court approval to provide an emergency abortion for a Dallas woman. He insisted that the doctor and her patient had not proven how, precisely, the patient’s condition threatened her life. 

Many doctors say this kind of message has encouraged doctors to “punt” patients instead of treating them.

No one in Texas is running on the virtues of this law. Colin Allred and some PACs are running ads criticizing the law, replete with personal stories. Allred is hanging it around Cruz’s neck. A new ad is doing the same thing to Trump. Will it be effective? 

It has been in every state so far. We live in hope, because joy comes in the morning.