Judge Jessica Mangrum of Austin Texas halts state abortion bans in cases of ‘emergent medical conditions’ threatening pregnant patients

11.54am Autin Texas

Judge halts state abortion bans in cases of ‘emergent medical conditions’ threatening pregnant patients.

A Texas judge issued an order late Friday temporarily barring the state from enforcing its ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy in cases where a patient’s life or health could be endangered by an “emergent medical condition.”

District Judge Jessica Mangrum, judge of Travis County’s 200th District Court in Austin, ruled the law is ambiguous enough to make it difficult for women to obtain abortions, even when facing serious medical complications.

The law “has created an imminent risk that Physician Plaintiffs and other physicians throughout Texas will have no choice but to bar or delay the provision of abortion care to pregnant persons in Texas for whom an abortion would prevent or alleviate a risk of death or risk to their health (including their fertility) for fear of liability under Texas’s abortion bans,” the ruling reads.

The order comes after the judge heard several days of testimony last month from women who say Texas law forced them to continue with high-risk pregnancies.

One plaintiff, Samantha Casiano, said she was forced to give birth to her daughter despite a diagnosis of anencephaly, a rare birth defect where parts of a baby’s skull and brain are missing. Casiano’s child died four hours after birth.

“All she could do was fight to try to get air,” Casiano testified in court. “I had to watch my daughter go from being pink to red to purple.” Samantha explained.

Lawyers for the state argued in court there was already an adequate exception in the statute for life-threatening pregnancies and blamed doctors for misinterpreting the law.

First Assistant Attorney General Brent Webster said in a statement the state filed an appeal that “stays an activist Austin judge’s attempt to override Texas abortion laws pending a ruling by the Texas Supreme Court.”

Texas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the country, and access was curtailed even further following the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision to overturn the federal right to abortion last summer. After the high court’s ruling, a trigger law in Texas banned all abortions other than those intended to protect the life of the mother. Before the ruling, Texas banned abortions in 2021 beyond six weeks of pregnancy.

The lawsuit was filed by Center for Reproductive Rights on behalf of two doctors and 13 women who suffered complications in pregnancy.

As a girl growing up in West, a small Texas town near Waco, Judge Jessica Mangrum saw first hand how being a lawyer can be a helping profession.

“My dad is an attorney, so I guess I grew up seeing him and his work, and I saw him very much as a helper,” said Mangrum, who took the bench in January of Travis County’s 200th District Court in Austin. “He did family law, he did personal injury, he did criminal defense. Hearing about his work, I saw the legal profession as a noble calling and as a way to be a helper in the community.”

“Today’s ruling should prevent other Texans from suffering the unthinkable trauma our plaintiffs endured,” said Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Same Austin, specific North Austin. As Marisol Perez fought for her life in a Texas hospital in autumn 2021, her mother, Alma Salas, sat with her every day praying. Perez, then 42, had such a virulent case of Covid and pneumonia that doctors at St. David’s North Austin Medical Center, an HCA Healthcare facility, had put her on a ventilator and into a coma to try to save her.

Salas said she believed her daughter would pull through, but doctors and nurses at the hospital kept telling her otherwise. Over 10 days in October, less than a month after Perez entered St. David’s, Salas received repeated visits from a palliative care nurse, her hospital record shows. Every other day, Salas said, the nurse urged her to initiate end-of-life care for her daughter. Several of Perez’s doctors also pressed Salas to remove her daughter from the ventilator, she said, in visits confirmed by details from Perez’s chart.

On one occasion, six or seven doctors and nurses gathered around Perez’s bed, Salas said. "We really feel it is in the best interests of your daughter to let her go," she recalled one doctor telling her.

Salas held firm. “I don’t have the authority to take anyone’s life,” she said she told them.

A month later, St. David’s discharged Perez, her chart shows. She went on to make a full recovery.

HCA Healthcare is the nation’s largest hospital chain, with more than 180 hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom. The company is highly profitable but has come under criticism from some doctors and nurses for practices they say put profits ahead of patients. NBC News reported in June that 27 doctors at 16 HCA facilities said their officials pushed doctors into admitting patients to hospice care, reducing in-hospital mortality rates, a closely watched quality measure, and freeing up beds more quickly, potentially generating more revenues. HCA’s spokesman said in a statement then that “Suggesting that medical care in HCA Healthcare hospitals is based on anything other than a physician’s independent medical judgment of what is in the patient’s best interest is untrue and wrong.”

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