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There is no 'Texas style ambiguity'. Texas bans abortions that aren't medically necessary. The high profile cases had no doubt about their case, they just didn't like the rules and wanted to showboat.
Which ones do you have in mind?
The state has made it clear that anything which looks like an abortion will receive extra scrutiny and political pressure, legal or not. Doctors have responded by shying away from the procedures which are most offensive to lawmakers. This is an obvious chilling effect!
@The_Nybbler will tell you that all of these were unambiguous, that the doctors responsible are immoral cowards, or worse, leftists, and that obviously the state would never make life difficult for an innocent man. I think, in my reasonable judgment, that he's full of shit.
It is tempting to believe that like leftists, rightists will engage in ridiculous contortions, twisting plain language to go after their enemy. And if that were true, abortion would certainly be the issue in which they would. But to my surprise the evidence of this is lacking; one interesting data point is that when an abortion law looked like it threatened IVF, Alabama fell over itself (overcorrecting, IMO) to avoid that. One might reasonably believe that Ken Paxton himself might be overzealous, but I believe he would have no support in Texas courts.
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You've linked to the specific statute before, and I don't think ProPublica (or the doctors involved) are operating under a good-faith analysis. "Guaranteed" is nowhere near the strict text of "in the exercise of reasonable medical judgment, the pregnant female on whom the abortion is performed, induced, or attempted has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated by, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced." Similarly, the "recorded ultrasound" requirement is actually "d) A physician making a determination under Subsection (b) shall record in the pregnant woman's medical record: (1) the estimated gestational age of the unborn child; (2) the method used to estimate the gestational age; and (3) the test used for detecting a fetal heartbeat, including the date, time, and results of the test."
And at least for ProPublica, that's not a one-off: ProPublica's coverage of Amber Thurman in Georgia was aggressively misleading, and its own staff defended the article not by claiming they had evidence to support it, but by motioning around how it could be possible.
I'd be a little more forgiving if Texas (Paxton or otherwise) had been going nuts with dubious prosecutions, but the only actual charges or serious threats of prosecution I can find are the Rojas cluster, and that entire thing has been more a mess for Texas than for the alleged abortion-provider.
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Indeed, you've changed my mind about it. If doctors are soldiers, we can note that indeed, soldiers have a harder time dealing with the enemy when overly-restrictive ROE are imposed. Friendlies get hurt, even killed, if you can't deal with cases where it's obvious to the soldier on the ground who the enemy is, but not to the politicians back home.
But then, what is to be done? Establishing a military-style court in the form of review with primacy over the criminal justice system won't fix the problem (soldiers get railroaded all the time there too), doctors (and more importantly, the organizations paying them) don't want to take that risk, and you have a major fraction of the population doing the Queers for Palestine thing about babies (perhaps even literally albeit unintentionally; Jews do tend to become doctors). Maybe a Red state should only employ Red tribe soldiers/doctors so that the kind of cultural clash presented here is minimized, but even that's no guarantee, for the US was Red from 2000-2008 and [as I understand it] the shift to Blue coincided with more restricted ROE simply because the average soldier was Red.
Maybe the best choice, or the only choice, is simply to accept that living in Texas has certain occupational hazards; to accept that the optimal number of doctors prosecuted for questionable abortions is not, and will not, be zero; and to make sure there's still some semblance of a West to run off to when there's no mind left in the nation to be changed about it.
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There was also some cases (Nevaeh Crain and Josseli Barnica) clearly within Texas's rules, but doctors claimed there was ambiguity and let the patient suffer and die to make a political point.
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