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Vermont, Colorado, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington DC, & New Mexico will let you abort any time you want. & infact, there are clinics around the US that will let you do so, such as the DuPont Clinic.
You missed Alaska, Michigan, Minnesota, and Maryland.
But every state has an exception to save the mother’s life. Even some of the most conservative, like Alabama, allow aborting nonviable pregnancies.
Sure, but the problem im pointing out here is that those abortions in several states are allowed no matter what! The moms life doesnt need to be in danger, she can do it for any reason at all.
Right.
All states “legalize abortion up to the moment of crowning” under some conditions. 10 states, most of them left-leaning, stripped the conditions. On the other hand, states like CA and NY, which are usually furthest left, didn’t feel the need.
This suggests that “legalize abortion up to the moment of crowning” was not really what “the Left wanted.” It’s more like a side effect of 1) avoiding Texas-style ambiguity and 2) countersignaling that they aren’t like those icky red states.
If one believes that unnecessary abortions are really quite rare, or that they are permissible if unsavory, then that looks like a good trade. If not, then it looks like leaving a loophole for sickos.
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.
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.
I agree that ProPublica falls somewhere between “biased” and “disingenuous,” and I tried not to rely on their testimonials. It is unfortunately difficult to find reporting which doesn’t trace back to those articles.
How would you interpret the Barnica case? Did the elevated risk of sepsis, which would then qualify as life-threatening, itself qualify as life-threatening? Does preventing the infection make the abortion unnecessary? Rov_Scam described it as
Now, I do think it’s reasonable to ask what happened to the potential prosecutions. I wasn’t able to find anything other than Texas v. Rojas, which as you noted has gone quite poorly for the state. The fact that it took nearly 3 years between Dobbs and those charges suggests that either Texas isn’t really willing to go after providers or that illegal abortions are in fact hard to find. This is compatible with a strong chilling effect, but it’s not good evidence for it.
I can't give a confident analysis, because I don't have the full information. But I don't think ProPublica's interpretation matches either the text of the statute, nor even the more uncharitable form of the legislative intent. Even ignoring how broad "the exercise of reasonable medical judgment", we normally don't treat prospective rules as bounded by the current situation: saying 'this situation is only going to cause sepsis' is like saying 'this sepsis isn't going to kill you immediately', saying 'we can just treat the infection but not the cause of the infection' is the equivalent of trying to defeat a self-defense case by saying 'you could have just shot it out of their hand'. There is no imminence requirement in the statute, despite ProPublica's direst efforts to imply one, and that's since been supported by the Texas Supreme Court and the relevant medical boards.
That doesn't stop someone from bringing a completely frivolous case, but the same goes for a situation without the law entirely.
Here's where I'll point out that ProPublica is conflating multiple separate legal environments. September 2021 was firmly pre-Dobbs, the defensive decisions here were against SB8's purely civil damages and Texas's not-relevant-here D&E and 20-week bans. There was no risk of prosecution in Barnica's situation; the tradeoff was just civil suit for malpractice versus civil suit under SB8 for abortion.
Now, maybe the doctors and hospitals made the correct (if incredibly immoral) financial tradeoff, here, since they didn't get a malpractice lawsuit! But that's a whole different calculus, and one undermined by there being literally zero successful SB8 civil trials, literally ever.
Barnica died literally days after SB8 went into effect, and her medical situation is not an uncommon one from a pure statistics perspective, nor one driven by abortion providers. Unless SB8's chilling effect dropped the number of mid-pregnancy miscarriages a couple of orders of magnitude, there's dozens more cases like hers, or this abortion wasn't illegal, there's limits to how far that explanation can go.
I'm less sure about this case than Thurman's, simply because the law was new enough the hospital's legal staff may genuinely have been reviewing it, and I have less information about Barnica's health status. But it's still not a close call on legality, just on moral culpability.
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