A bill providing greater clarity about Texas abortion laws’ protections for the life of the mother was unanimously passed by the Texas senate and signed into law.
As a contentious legislative session was wrapping up in Texas, Republicans and Democrats found common ground on the issue of abortion.
The Texas senate unanimously passed a bill that doesn’t change Texas law so much as it helps provide greater clarity about how Texas’s abortion laws allow immediate treatment for a life-threatening condition known as previable premature rupture of membranes (PPROM) — when an expectant mother’s water breaks before viability. The house agreed to it by a 128–12 vote, and Texas governor Greg Abbott signed it into law on Wednesday.
As national and Texas pro-life groups (and National Review) have been emphasizing for a year, Texas’s abortion laws do not require medical providers to wait until a threat to the life of the mother becomes imminent. A lawsuit filed by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights against the State of Texas acknowledged that the abortion laws’ “exception does not require that any of the risks to the pregnant person be imminent” and that “physicians are over-complying with the laws to the detriment of their patients’ lives.” Some Texas hospitals have indeed dangerously delayed care in cases of PPROM.
“Texas law is already clear, but because some doctors and hospitals were not following the law, we wanted to remove any doubt and remove any excuse for not giving the care that the moms need in these cases,” Texas state senator Bryan Hughes, a sponsor of the bill, told National Review in a phone interview. Hughes, a Republican, noted that “Democrats and Republicans recognize that women were being harmed by this [incorrect] interpretation of the law.” He added, “That’s why you see the big numbers, big majorities in the house and the senate agreeing to do this.”
Hughes, who attended Abbott’s signing of the bill on Wednesday, said of the signing ceremony: “We had a number of pro-life groups there, as well as the Texas Medical Association, Texas Hospital Association.” Hughes said the associations “approved the language in the bill during the process of getting it negotiated and passed,” and that he believed the associations were either already educating their members about the measure or had plans to do so (spokesmen for both the Texas Medical Association and Texas Hospital Association did not reply to messages requesting comment from National Review on Wednesday).
Texas representative Ann Johnson, the Democratic house sponsor of H.B. 3058, issued a press release on Wednesday that said “HB 3058 ensures that pregnant women who are experiencing complications receive the medical treatment they need in a timely manner.”
The bill, H.B. 3058, amends the penal code to say that a “physician or health care provider is justified in exercising reasonable medical judgment” in cases of treating PPROM or ectopic pregnancies anywhere in the body. (Texas law already explicitly excluded treatment of ectopic pregnancies from the definition of abortion.) H.B. 3058 also says the state medical board may “not take disciplinary action against a physician” in such cases and that treating such cases is an “affirmative defense” in any civil lawsuit.
Senator Hughes is hopeful the new measure will finally get those Texas hospital administrators and lawyers who have either misinterpreted the law or have been unreasonably afraid of it to reverse course. He’s also hopeful that the Texas Medical Board, an official state agency, will provide formal guidance to hospitals about what the law means. The agency has so far not provided guidance, and a spokesman told National Review on Friday it couldn’t comment due to pending litigation.
But there has never been a good excuse for Texas hospitals to delay treatment in these cases. Fears stoked by the media over Texas’s six-week abortion limit, enforced only via civil lawsuits, have been overblown: In nearly two years since the law took effect, the only doctor known to have been sued was one who wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which he deliberately attempted to create a legal challenge by suggesting that he performed an illegal elective abortion. In the year since Texas’s criminal abortion law has been in effect, no medical provider has been prosecuted. Abortion advocates have blamed Texas’s abortion laws themselves for what they call “understandable confusion” about what the exception protecting the life and physical health of the mother allows, but abortion opponents have pointed out that life-threatening conditions were routinely treated before Roe, and they were routinely treated since Texas’s 20-week abortion ban took effect in 2013. The 2013 law included an exception that is identical to the laws in effect since 2021 and 2022.
But some hospitals have harmed women, such as Amanda Zurawski, by delaying treatment in cases of PPROM, waiting until there the mother’s condition became dire. When such cases came to light, no one in the pro-life community stood up and said, yes, that’s what Texas law requires. Pro-life groups have been making the case before those incidents occurred that Texas law allows immediate delivery in cases of PPROM, even though some mothers will choose expectant management. Pro-lifers have been urging those in positions of authority to ensure hospitals properly understand the law. As National Review recently editorialized, providing such clarifying guidance is “perhaps the single most important thing pro-life officials can do right now.”