No Politician Should Play Doctor
By: Justin Lappen, MD and Leilah Zahedi-Spung, MD
On December 5, the Center for Reproductive Rights filed a lawsuit in Texas on behalf of Kate Cox, a 31-year-old woman who needed an abortion after experiencing severe pregnancy complications and learning that her baby would be stillborn or die soon after birth. While an Austin judge granted a temporary restraining order allowing the procedure, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton quickly asked the state Supreme Court to intervene. Ultimately, hours after Cox’s legal team announced she would seek care out of state immediately, the Texas Supreme Court blocked the initial order, ruling that Cox did not qualify for a medical exception.
While the entire case is an egregious display of governmental overreach, there was a particular level of hypocrisy from Attorney General Paxton, who wrote a separate letter to three Houston hospitals threatening that the initial order would not protect them or any medical providers from civil or criminal liability.
In the letter, Attorney General Paxton claimed that the order failed to identify why Cox’s condition was life-threatening or would cause “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” Paxton later wrote that the Judge who granted the order is “not medically qualified to make this determination and it should not be relied upon.”
To that we say: neither are you, Attorney General Paxton. Nor are any of the politicians who support or enforce abortion care bans across the country. To someone with no medical education, it may not be clear why Cox or anyone else may need an abortion. As physicians with decades of training and experience caring for people with high-risk pregnancies, we do know why Cox’s condition and many others are life-threatening – and we shouldn’t have to stop and explain this to a judge, a jury, or an Attorney General.
Anti-abortion advocates and politicians claim to care about our patients. They point to arbitrary “exceptions” as proof, and then blame doctors and hospitals when a patient must wait or travel for care because these “exceptions” are too confusing and far too narrow to capture the complexities of pregnancy. Attorney General Paxton’s response confirms our fears and will only increase the number of doctors who are afraid to provide care in states with abortion bans.
Despite the pain she endured, both publicly and privately, Kate Cox was fortunate to have the resources and the wherewithal to travel out of state to access the care she needed. But for every Kate Cox, there are countless pregnant people who do not have the money, the time off work, or the childcare to put their lives on hold and travel out of state. This is especially true for pregnant people from historically marginalized communities, who bear the brunt of the crisis our policymakers have created.
We see firsthand the despair that families experience when a pregnancy doesn’t go as planned, and we are appalled that our government officials think they should decide what to do in these scenarios. As long as politicians continue to insert themselves in your decisions, we are committed to fighting this battle beside you.
Justin Lappen, MD, is a maternal-fetal medicine physician in Cleveland, Ohio. He serves as the Chair of the Reproductive Health Advisory Group at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the nation’s largest organization for clinicians and researchers with expertise in high-risk pregnancy.
Leilah Zahedi-Spung, MD is maternal-fetal medicine physician in Denver, Colorado. She is a member of the Reproductive Health Advisory Group at the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, the nation’s largest organization for clinicians and researchers with expertise in high-risk pregnancy.